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0 pointsdj-wonk10y ago0 comments

Transducers are part of cultural drive of the Clojure community to identify common patterns and simplify design. Rich's presentations do a nice job of explaining how a transducer is about separating [how to do the work] from [where the work is done]. By "work" I mean mapping, filtering, reducing, and so on. By "where the work is done", I mean that a transducer doesn't care what kind of data structure it operates on.

If you keep this in mind, perhaps re-reading http://clojure.org/transducers won't be as intimidating.

As a general comment, to those new to Clojure, when you find something in Clojure that seems strange or different, I encourage you to ask "What does [function X] care about? (e.g. need to know)" and "What does [function X] not need to know?". This relentless drive to simplify design and responsibilities mean that functions are small and "opinionated", but in ways that are driven by constraints, not arbitrary decisions. So these choices make a lot of sense -- I'd argue they flow pretty naturally.

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jarcane10y ago

Don't get me wrong; I'm not knocking it. I definitely see the value in these kinds of features.

Like zippers, I'm sure it's another case of "If you understand it, it's really useful."

The point is, you don't necessarily need it to get the job done, and you certainly don't need to be intimidated about it or feel obligated to learn it right off.

Even Haskell isn't actually so difficult to grasp the basics of, if you keep this in mind and just think "Do IO in a 'do' block" and go about your way. See [1].

You don't have to know everything in any language just to get some work done, a lot of times advanced features are just that: advanced, stuff for doing things a bit more efficiently, or to handle certain rough edge cases. Learn them in their own time, and they'll make you better at what you do, but don't get wrapped up too much in expecting perfect efficiency from yourself.

A lot of programmers seem to be, as a people, kinda bad at this kind of self-reflection, like we're all sheep in wolves' clothing trying to avoid showing a hint of weakness. I know I sure am. There's nothing wrong with not knowing something, just try and take a moment learn it when you can.

[1] http://blog.jle.im/entry/io-monad-considered-harmful

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