Shall mapcols be deprecated?

[bkamins]

@deprecate `mapcols(fun, df)` select(df, names(df) .=> fun .=> names(df))

the only benefit of mapcols is that it allows for do block, so maybe we should leave it.

CC @nalimilan @oxinabox

[nalimilan]

I guess the main reason to remove it would be to reduce the number of functions ending in "cols" (the other one being insertcols!). Otherwise it doesn't really hurt to have it.

[bkamins]

Well - we want to deprecate aggregate to reduce the number of functions we expose.

What difference do you see between aggregate and mapcols here?.

[nalimilan]

aggregate is a very generic term which means different things in other languages. mapcols! is more explicit. But I'm not particularly attached to it. IIRC it mainly exists because it used to be map when DataFrames were column-oriented, but it may not have a very good reason to exist. I imagine the main use case is standardizing columns.

[bkamins]

OK - let us just keep it. I am closing the issue.

@oxinabox - please reopen (or comment to reopen - I am not sure if you have rights to reopen issues in this repo) if you feel it is worth to deprecate it.