I believe LINQ maps to a chains of function calls on an enumerable, with the functions usually taking anonymous functions as input (and then the series of funct

I believe LINQ maps to a chains of function calls on an enumerable, with the functions usually taking anonymous functions as input (and then the series of functions is rewritten into a SQL statement by EF to hit the DB). I don’t think you’d be able to support type analysis if you didn’t specify the enumerable upfront Eg Mylist.select(x => …) can determine the type of x, because it has the type of mylist —> List<T> Select(x => …).from(mylist) and you simply can’t determine x, because C# type analysis can’t go backwards. So I think it’s less a UX question and more of an absolute requirement for the API to work at all. The alternative would be a SelectFrom(x => …, mylist) function so it can be submitted in one shot, essentially what SQL is doing, but that’s disgusting — who doesn’t love function chaining?