I suspect this is a transitory concern. I suspect you’re coming from an OO world (like most) where it is common to call methods on objects. As a functional language, Elixir has no methods at all. It’s functions. This . syntax just looks like a method/member access, but it’s really a function. Once you’ve spent more time with Elixir and internalized this information, the confusion should subside.

Eh, technically it is a function call, it lowers down to become :maps.get(:hello, %{hello: "test"}). On the beam VM there is no such thing as a map extraction operator like ., rather you can extract only by matching out the value via a hardcoded key or by calling the built in internal functions in the :maps module, and Elixir lowers to them.

Thanks to everyone, hope this thread will be useful to someone else.

I marked @OvermindDL1 post as “solution” because it contains also the explanation of @gregvaughn and it’s not possible to mark multiple solutions

Thank you michal, I undestand that the AST is the same. See initial post regarding map access.
Since you are saying that the compiler does not differentiate, I guess we should live with that.

However having in code redundant parentheses (when accessing a map value) seems confusing to me.

iex(1)> %{hello: "test"}.hello()
"test"

is not a function call.

Thanks for elaborating @OvermindDL1
However it think that it might be confusing from the syntax perspective. In the end that’s what I mean.

For example:

iex(1)> defmodule Test do
...(1)> defstruct [:greeting]
...(1)> end
{:module, Test,
 <<70, 79, 82, 49, 0, 0, 5, 184, 66, 69, 65, 77, 65, 116, 85, 56, 0, 0, 0, 181,
   0, 0, 0, 18, 11, 69, 108, 105, 120, 105, 114, 46, 84, 101, 115, 116, 8, 95,
   95, 105, 110, 102, 111, 95, 95, 7, 99, ...>>, %Test{greeting: nil}}
iex(2)> %Test{greeting: "hello"}
%Test{greeting: "hello"}
iex(3)> test = %Test{greeting: "hello"}
%Test{greeting: "hello"}
iex(4)> test.greeting()
"hello"
iex(5)> test.greeting  
"hello"
iex(6)> 

Not sure if I am too “picky” on this one