It turns out that JavaScript is not Haskell

We were pretty excited about one feature of Ramda v0.5.0. I even wrote a blog post about it.

The problem we thought we were solving was: How do you curry infix operators in prefix form, when the operation is not commutative? Haskell solves this problem very elegantly. For example, exponentiation. Haskell uses the caret symbol (^) for this operation. You can use it infix as you’d expect:

    λ 2^10
        1024
        :: Num a => a

Converting to prefix and currying is beatiful. If you want a function to calculate e.g. 2^n:

    λ (2^) 
        :: (Integral b, Num a) => b -> a
    λ (2^) 10
        1024
        :: Num a => a

And if you want a function for n^2:

    λ (^2) 
        :: Num a => a -> a
    λ (^2) 10
        100
        :: Num a => a

That’s what we wanted; that’s what we made ourselves believe we were getting. But it turns out–SPOILER ALERT–Javascript is not Haskell. What we got instead was confusing and inconsistent. David Chambers, a regular, and very valuable Ramda contributor, observed:

This is very surprising:

R.divide(10, 2) //=> 5

R.divide(10)(2) //=> 0.2

Uh-oh. Then J. A. Forbes pointed out:

Why is it that flipping twice removes the inconsistency?

R.divide = R.compose(R.flip,R.flip)(R.divide)

R.divide(10,2) //=> 5

R.divide(10)(2) //=> 5

This cat sums up the process pretty well. Started with so much optimism …

Wow, it is so much better on this side of the fence

Clearly, our shiny, new implementation of op–a way to curry operators in a left-section/right-section fashion–was not only confusing, but inconsistent. It was holed below the waterline and sinking fast.

So, my apologies. I really thought we had something cool there. But it wound up being a dud.

We have learned from it, however. In the master branch of Ramda now, I have re-implemented op with consistent behavior and semantics, essentially using a “placeholder” approach, e.g:

    R.divide = R.op(function(a, b) { return a / b; });
    
    var half = R.divide(__, 2); // `__` here is some undefined value
    half(100) //=> 50
    
    var reciprocal = divide(1);
    reciprocal(4) //=> 0.25

But we may not stop there. This has us thinking we can have a generalized placeholder approach to currying. Early experiments are promising. I’ll try to keep you posted.

Buzz de Cafe 02 October 2014