Sunday, May 15, 2016

Currying in Haskell, Clojure, Ruby and JavaScript

I worked with a developer about a year ago, who had more experience with functional programming than I had. We worked on a Clojure project, and his deep Haskell background made him an expert on our team. This was especially revealing when we discussed partial function applications and currying. I was vaguely familiar with the concept, but I've never used them in any of the apps I've worked on.

Fast forward a year, after learning and playing with Haskell for a few months, I understand why: in Haskell, everything is curried. I repeat: everything. Even the function invocation is curried. In fact, you have to work hard if you want it differently. No wonder, currying was so obvious for that developer.

haskell-logo

Let's look at a simple example in Haskell:

-- You can type this in your own GHCi or try it in https://ghc.io/
let multiply x y = x * y
let double = multiply 2
let triple = multiply 3

double 3
triple 4

I created a multiply function that takes two arguments and multiplies them. In Haskell everything is curried, it's perfectly fine to invoke this function with only a single argument. What will I get back? Another function. This was the breakthrough for me: partially applying a function yields another function. Then I defined two other functions, one that passes in 2 to double, the other 3 to triple whatever argument I pass to it.

What I was amazed by this was the easiness and the natural nature of Haskell's currying through partial application.

Let's see how this simple example would look in Clojure.

(defn multiply [x y] (* x y))
(def double (partial multiply 2))
(def triple (partial multiply 3))

(double 3) ;; will yield 6
(triple 4) ;; will produce 12

This works, but yuck, I had to use a special language construct partial to signal, that I'll be partially applying the multiply function. Based on the Haskell example, my intuition was to use defn for the double and triple functions, but that tripped me over, it did not work. I had to "StackOverflow" it to realize, that the def binding is needed instead of defn to produce the partially applied function. This is a far cry from Haskell, where everything felt natural.

Although Ruby is a dynamically typed object-oriented language, it has many functional constructs that I enjoy using. I was curious if Ruby supports currying. To my surprise, it does. Look at the same example with partial functions and currying in Ruby.

multiply = -> (x, y) { x * y }
double = multiply.curry.(2)
triple = multiply.curry.(3)

double.(3) # will yield 6
triple.(4) # will produce 12
Well, this works, but it's far from Haskell's obvious nature, where I did not have to use any kind of special keywords to achieve the same result.

Here is how I would write this with "programming by wishful thinking":

# This won't work
multiply = -> (x, y) { x * y }
double = multiply(2)
triple = multiply(3)

I am sure the Ruby language authors had a reason to use curry for partial applications, but it just did not feel natural. I have to learn and remember how to use it properly.

There are currying related npm packages in Node.js, but I have not found anything that's built into the language. Here is how the poor man's currying is done in JavaScript:

var multiply = function(x) {
  return function(y) {
    return x * y;
  }
}

var double = multiply(2);
var triple = multiply(3);

double(3); // will yield 6
triple(4); // will produce 12
I like JavaScript's "functions are first class citizens" nature, I am sure once ES6 or 7 gets widely adopted, it will be a language I'll enjoy using in the future.

Learning about currying in one language and using those concepts in another is an obvious benefit of learning a programming language in every year.