Comment by verinus

4 years ago

if you are used to imperative programming, then yes.

But in a for loop anything can happen- from a map to a reduce to a mix, to whatever convoluted logic the dev comes up with.

3 comments

verinus

ajuc 4 years ago

Technically you can implement map as reduce ;)

But yes - for me

    (defn factorial [n]
      (reduce * (range 1 (inc n))))

is slightly more readable than

    def factorial(n):
        result = 1
        for i in range(2,n+1):
           result *= i
        return result

I mean in this case the name kinda makes it obvious anyway :)

If the operation is conceptually accumulating something over the whole collection and if it's idiomatic in the language I'm using - I will use reduce. Same with map-y and filter-y operations.

But if I have to do some mental gymnastics to make the operation fit reduce - for loop it is. Or generator expression in case of python.

distances 4 years ago

Indeed. I rarely encounter basic loops in code reviews now, so seeing one is definitely a small alert to do an extra thorough review of that part.

watwut 4 years ago

And it is usually very easy and straightforward to see what is going on inside.