29 January 2014

Poor .reduceRight. This JavaScript late-comer (ES 5.1) does the same thing as .reduce, only backwards. No wonder this seemingly forgotten function gets no love.

Well, I love you, .reduceRight. With the help of _part_, I made a compose function which I find more elegant than my previous versions of composition.

_part_._borrow( this, Array.prototype )( "reduceRight" );

function csub( g, f ) {
return f( g );
}

var _compose = _part_._create( function ( x ) {
return reduceRight_( csub )( this , x );
} );

csub represents the composition operator. So, you might read it aloud as “c sub g f” which equates to f(g). But that’s just academic stuffs. The cool part happens when I make a slight change to an example from lodash:

//this seems weird, but order matters
//flip the compose fn's below to see how
var realNameMap = {
'pebbles': 'penelope'
};

var format = function(name) {
name = realNameMap[name.toLowerCase()] || name;
return name.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + name.slice(1).toLowerCase();
};

var greet = function(formatted) {
return 'Hiya ' + formatted + '!';
};

//I now prefer arrays of "un-composed" functions over
//only having composed groups as arguments or needing to .apply the array
var welcome = _compose( [greet, format] );
welcome('pebbles');
// → 'Hiya Penelope!'

This makes me even more excited for the upcoming rest parameters and spread operator because I can use them to collect extra arguments for the first invocation with one small change:

var _compose = _part_._create( function ( ...x ) {
return reduceRight_( csub )( this , ...x );
} );

Try it out, now.



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