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Creating Clojure Pipelines By Thrushing

Clojure has a few fun macros that help your thread an expression through one or more forms. These macros are also sometimes referred to as the thrush operators. Here’s a few:

(There are more of these, but this is a good place to start. And damn are they hard to find using a search engine. Save yourself some grief and just bookmark ClojureDocs.)

Here’s basically what I think they do. In functional programming you tend to think “inside-out”. That is, you start manipulating your data in the middle of your code and then send those results to one or more wrapping functions.

So for example, let’s say you wanted to know how much to tip for a check, and you prefer to calculate the amount based on the post-tax total. The conventional way to do that with a functional language is like this:

user> (def amount 20.00)
;; => #'user/amount
user> (def sales-tax 0.075)
;; => #'user/sales-tax
user> (def tip-percetage 0.2)
;; => #'user/tip-percentage
user> (* (+ (* amount sales-tax) amount) tip-percentage)
;; => 4.3

To read that code you would first look at the innermost expression, (* amount sales-tax). You would then take the result of that operation (a sequence of even numbers) and pass that to the + function.

This is a bit unfamiliar to people who are used to shell scripting, which depend upon pipelines. Here’s an example:

ps auxwww | grep -v grep | grep firefox
#> tom         5572  4.0  9.3 6142372 726572 ?      Sl   Dec28 179:09 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox

Here, the output of the first command, ps auxwww is passed to the first grep command, which filters out any line containing the string “grep” using the -v flag. Then that output is sent to the second grep command, which filters out everything except the lines containing the string firefox.

You could argue that the shell pipeline is a bit easier to read, because it goes left-to-right. There isn’t really any nesting. And that’s what I believe the thrush operators are for – making it easier to specify how you want to manipulate your data in a pipeline.

So here’s the Clojure example again, this time with a thrush operator:

user> (-> amount
    (* sales-tax)
    (+ amount)
    (* tip-percentage))
;; => 4.3

This evaluates to this:

user> (use 'clojure.walk')
;; => nil
user> (macroexpand-all '(-> amount (* sales-tax) (+ amount) (* tip-percentage)))
;; => (* (+ (* amount sales-tax) amount) tip-percentage)

…which is exactly what we had above. Just easier to read. Also, how cool is the macroexpand-all function? I’m so happy to have learned about this today.

The difference between ->> and -> was a bit confusing to me at first, but it ll has to do with where the expr is placed in the following forms. Here’s an example:

user> (def c 5)
;; => #'user/c
user> (-> c (+ 3) (/ 2) (- 1))
;; => 3
user> (->> c (+ 3) (/ 2) (- 1))
;; => 3/4
user> (macroexpand-all '(-> c (+ 3) (/ 2) (- 1)))
;; => (- (/ (+ c 3) 2) 1)
user> (macroexpand-all '(->> c (+ 3) (/ 2) (- 1)))
;; => (- 1 (/ 2 (+ 3 c)))

Either way, I’m happy to have discovered these fantastic macros. I imagine it will make my Clojure code much simpler to imagine and read.

Tags: #clojure