· clojure

Clojure: First steps with reducers

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:

(defn log2 [n]
  (/ (Math/log n) (Math/log 2)))

(defn score-item [n]
  (if (= n 0) 0 (log2 n)))

(+ (score-item 12) (score-item 13) (score-item 5)) 9.60733031374961

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

(reduce #(+ %1 (score-item %2)) 0 [12 13 5]) 9.60733031374961

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:

(reduce #(+ %1 (score-item %2)) 0 [12 13 5 6]) 12.192292814470767

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:

(require '[clojure.core.reducers :as r])

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

(r/reduce #(+ %1 (score-item %2)) 0 [12 13 5 6]) 12.192292814470767

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:

(->>[12 13 5 6]
    (map score-item)
    (filter #(> % 3))) (3.5849625007211565 3.700439718141092)

(->> [12 13 5 6]
     (r/map score-item)
     (r/filter #(> % 3))) #object[clojure.core.reducers$folder$reify__19192 0x5d0edf21 "clojure.core.reducers$folder$reify__19192@5d0edf21"]

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:

(->> [12 13 5 6]
     (r/map score-item)
     (r/filter #(> % 3))
     (into [])) (3.5849625007211565 3.700439718141092)

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!

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