Transducers in Python

[This will be a joint meetup with Oslo Socially Functional Programmers, so if you are member of both meetup groups, please only RSVP in one group, so we can get an accurate view of numbers.]

Transducers - a portmanteau of ‘transform reducers’ - are a new functional programming concept introduced into the Clojure programming language. Although transducers are actually pretty straightforward in retrospect, wrapping your brain around them, especially if you’re not already a competent Clojureist, can be challenging.

In this session, we introduce transducers by implementing them from scratch in everybody’s favourite executable pseudocode, Python. We’ll start with the familiar staples of functional programming, map(), filter() and reduce(), and derive transducers from first principles. We’ll work towards a set of general tools which work with eager collections, lazy ‘pull’ sequences, and ‘push’ event streams. Along the way we’ll cover stateful transducers and transducer composition, demonstrating that transducers are both more general, and more fundamental, than the functional programming tools baked into Python and many other languages.