Reducing reduce

[Joe Bowbeer]

I'm not seeing a good reason not to keep the 3-arg form.

I like it for pedagogical reasons.  The string-compare is not really a
practical example, after all, so I'm not bothered that it uses boxed().  I
think there are potential practical uses for the 3-arg form, and its
inclusion gives us something to point at when asked by viewers of Guy's
talks or users of Clojure.

This is not a classic case of YAGNI.  The "are going to" case has already
been made.

The argument that, well, it doesn't work so nicely in Java, will need some
more explaining before I buy it.

Joe


On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 3:46 PM, Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com> wrote:

> See earlier posting on "reducing reduce."  Two reasons:
>
>  - People find it confusing -- they want to know why they have to specify
> two functions that "do the same thing."  (Because they are thinking
> sequentially.)  And that confusion then infects all the reduce forms.
>
>  - The cases where it has an advantage over either map+reduce or collect
> seem to be somewhat limited.  And, due to lots of accidental complexity
> reasons, often involve a fair amount of object creation overhead, which
> starts to eat into the potential performance advantage.
>
> So through the combination of "few people will use it, but it confuses
> everyone", it seems a reasonable candidate for pruning.
>
>
>
> On 2/18/2013 6:34 PM, Joe Bowbeer wrote:
>
>> Maybe I'm confused.
>>
>> Why are you now trying to eliminate it?
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 3:20 PM, Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com
>> <mailto:brian.goetz at oracle.com**>> wrote:
>>
>>         2. Why don't we have a parallel fold (map+combine) like Rich
>> Hickey
>>         added to Clojure?
>>
>>         http://clojure.com/blog/2012/_**_05/08/reducers-a-library-and-**
>> __model-for-collection-__**processing.html<http://clojure.com/blog/2012/__05/08/reducers-a-library-and-__model-for-collection-__processing.html>
>>
>>         <http://clojure.com/blog/2012/**05/08/reducers-a-library-and-**
>> model-for-collection-**processing.html<http://clojure.com/blog/2012/05/08/reducers-a-library-and-model-for-collection-processing.html>
>> >
>>
>>
>>     I'm confused -- the 3-arg reduce was directly inspired by Rich's
>>     Reducers work?
>>
>>
>>