Introduction
I like to write technical articles to teach myself a subject I don't fully understand. It forces me to learn more deeply that particular topic to be able to teach others. In a way, it's more about teaching myself, but if others can learn, that's a nice bonus. In this article, we will explore a technique called currying. Currying is another concept in functional programming. It goes as follow: when a function expects several arguments, we break it down into successive chained functions that each take a single argument.
We reduce the arity of each function to one ( arity is the arguments length of a function ). Let's see some examples.
Note: You should probably understand closures before going further. Maybe with this?
Simple currying
Let's start with a non-curried example. We want to calculate the sum of the arguments given to a function:
A curried version of the sum function would look like so:
sumCurry(1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(8) //29
How would we implement currying then? Well, let's try something like this:
Ok, let's break the curried function down a bit.
It takes 2 arguments, the first is the function to be called at the end ( sum in our case ), the second is the arity we expect ( the number of arguments we want before calling sum ).
This function returns a IIFE ( Immediately Invoked Function Expression ). This IIFE takes a empty array as a parameter on its first call. It returns another function with the next argument in our curry sequence as an argument and the function adds it to our collection of arguments. On the first call, our array is empty so the variable args is equal to [ 1 ].
We check if we have enough arguments to call our original function. If not, we create another curried function and keep collecting arguments. If we do, we call sum with all of our arguments.
Another example
Let's imagine we are in a restaurant. We can order one dish and a dessert. We have four different components to our order, the customer's id, its table number, the dish and the dessert.
Our curried function would look like so:
curriedOrder(customerId)(tableNumber)(dish)(dessert)
Let's create a function that just returns the order:
const displayOrder = (...infos) => {
let order = `Customer ${infos[0].toUpperCase()} at table ${infos[1]} wants ${infos[2]} ${infos[3] ? `and ${infos[3]} for dessert.` : '.'}`
return order
}
Nothing fancy here. Let's curry this with the function we created earlier:
Why use currying?
The first reason to use a technique like currying is that you can separate in your codebase when and where your arguments are specified. You may not have all the arguments necessary to call the sum function right away, or all the order informations to print them out.
The client gets in the restaurant, you don't know where she is going to sit yet. Her name is Johanna.
The same issue could be applied if we wanted to calculate a sum with our earlier function.
If we don't have the number of arguments required yet, our curry returns a function. We only call the original function when all the arguments are there.
The second reason to work with curried functions is because it is a lot easier to work with unary ( single argument ) functions. Composition is more effective with single argument functions, and a key component of functional programming.
I also like how readable it makes the code, but it might be a personal preference.
Well, that was an introduction about currying. I used a curry-fier to dig a bit more deeply about possible implementations and how functional librairies might implement their own curry functions.
Hope it was clear enough.