Inside the Rails code, people tend to use the Enumerable#inject method to create hashes, like this:
somme_enum.inject({}) do |hash, element|
hash[element.foo] = element.bar
hash
end
While this appears to have become a common idiom, does anyone see an advantage over the "naive" version, which would go like:
hash = {}
some_enum.each { |element| hash[element.foo] = element.bar }
The only advantage I see for the first version is that you do it in a closed block and you don't (explicitly) initialize the hash. Otherwise it abuses a method unexpectedly, is harder to understand and harder to read. So why is it so popular?