Apparently it was fine to rename "flatten" to "flat," because that's what they did, but it wasn't okay to rename "flatten" to "smoosh." What's the difference?
Probably that flatten has a near-universal meaning across many programming languages, and flat is so close to flatten as to have its meaning be almost implicitly clear, whereas smoosh has absolutely zero precedent and its behavior would be completely uninferrable without looking up documentation.
It actually wasn’t fine to rename flatten() to flat() - flat isn’t a verb, flatten() seems natural, and now you have to explain to everyone that yes it’s called flat() because someone on a standards committee really likes unmaintained web sites that probably have expired domains, expired certs, non paid for hosting but might run mootools.
