I finally understood what a reducer is!

Original URL: https://siderite.dev/blog/i-finally-understood-what-reducer-is/

When I was looking at Javascript frameworks like Angular and ReactJS I kept running into these weird reducers that were used in state management mostly. It all felt so unnecessarily complicated, so I didn't look too closely into it. Today, reading some random post on dev.to, I found this simple and concise piece of code that explains it:

// simple to unit test this reducer
function maximum(max, num) { return Math.max(max, num); }

// read as: 'reduce to a maximum' 
let numbers = [5, 10, 7, -1, 2, -8, -12];
let max = numbers.reduce(maximum);

Kudos to David for the code sample.

The reducer, in this case, is a function that can be fed to the the reduce function, which is known to developers in Javascript and a few other languages, but which for .NET developers it's foreign. In LINQ, we have Aggregate!

// simple to unit test this Aggregator ( :) )
Func<int, int, int> maximum = (max, num) => Math.Max(max, num);

// read as: 'reduce to a maximum' 
var numbers = new[] { 5, 10, 7, -1, 2, -8, -12 };
var max = numbers.Aggregate(maximum);

Of course, in C# Math.Max is already a reducer/Aggregator and can be used directly as a parameter to Aggregate.

I found a lot of situations where people used .reduce instead of a normal loop, which is why I almost never use Aggregate, but there are situations where this kind of syntax is very useful. One would be in functional programming or LINQ expressions that then get translated or optimized to something else before execution, like SQL code. (I don't know if Entity Framework translates Aggregate, though). Another would be where you have a bunch of reducers that can be used interchangeably.