I’ve been playing around with Clojure a bit today in preparation for a talk I’m giving next week and found myself writing the following code to apply the same function to three different scores:

I’d forgotten about folding over a collection but quickly remembered that I could achieve the same result with the following code:

The added advantage here is that if I want to add a 4th score to the mix all I need to do is append it to the end of the vector:

However, while Googling to remind myself of the order of the arguments to reduce I kept coming across articles and documentation about reducers which I’d heard about but never used.

As I understand they’re used to achieve performance gains and easier composition of functions over collections so I’m not sure how useful they’ll be to me but I thought I’d give them a try.

Our first step is to bring the namespace into scope:

Now we can compute the same result using the reduce function:

So far, so identical. If we wanted to calculate individual scores and then filter out those below a certain threshold the code would behave a little differently:

Instead of giving us a vector of scores the reducers version returns a reducer which can pass into reduce or fold if we want an accumulated result or into if we want to output a collection. In this case we want the latter:

With a measly 4 item collection I don’t think the reducers are going to provide much speed improvement here but we’d need to use the http://clojure.org/reference/reducers#_using_reducers function if we want processing of the collection to be done in parallel.

One for next time!