Functional Programming: currying and partial application

An explanation of currying and partial application using JavaScript

Let's start with a simple function that takes two numbers and adds them together:


const add = function (a, b) {
  return a + b
}
add(1, 2) //-> 3

Now, instead of a single function that takes two arguments and returns a value, I'm going to rewrite this so that add is a function that takes a single argument, and returns another function which accepts a single argument, and then returns the sum of both arguments:


const add = function (a) {
  return function (b) {
    return a + b
  }
}
add(1)(2) //-> 3

To make this a bit tidier, the same can be written with arrow functions:


const add = a => b => a + b
add(1)(2) //-> 3

Taking a function that accepts multiple values, and transforming it to a 'stream' of functions that each only accept a single argument is called currying.

Writing functions in this style is a bit tedious though. We can write a higher-order function curry that will take a function that accepts multiple arguments, and return a curried version of that function:


const curry = func => function curried(...args) {
  if (args.length >= func.length) {
    return func.apply(this, args)
  }
  return curried.bind(this, ...args)
}

Now instead of manually nesting our add function we can simply:


const add = curry((a, b) => a + b)
add(1) //-> [Function]
add(1, 2) //-> 3

Why go through all this trouble? Well, imagine you want to write another function that increments a number by one:


const inc = n => 1 + n
inc(2) //-> 3

This would work, but it's very similar to the add function we already wrote. Using the curried version of add above, writing an inc function becomes as simple as:


const inc = add(1)
inc(2) //-> 3

Taking a curried function and supplying less arguments than it expects is called partial application.

In a previous post I talked about re-implementing reduce. Here's that reduce function, but wrapped with curry:


const reduce = curry((fn, init, arr) => {
  let response = init
  for (let i = 0, l = arr.length; i < l; ++i) {
    response = fn(response, arr[i])
  }
  return response
})

With this, we can take our add function from earlier, and create a sum function that adds all the numbers in an array:


const sum = reduce(add, 0)
sum([1, 2, 3]) //-> 6

These are fairly boring things to curry, so I'll share a fun example of currying I used recently.

I wanted to write a script that would send multiple requests to different sites, pulling in data from a lot of places, possibly sending muliple requests to each site, and all of the requests needed to have API keys with each call.

There are tons of libraries that handle making requests but none of them have a curried version. Here's a thin wrapper around SuperAgent


const prop = curry((key, o) => o[key])
const request = curry((base, header, method, endpoint, data = {}) => {
  return Promise.try(() => prop(method, {
    post: superagent(method, `${base}${endpoint}`).set(header).send(data),
    get: superagent(method, `${base}${endpoint}`).set(header).query(data),
  }))
  .then(prop(body))
}
const gitHub = request('https://api.github.com/', { Authorization: `token ${myGitHub.key}` })
const gitLab = request('https://gitlab.com/api/v4/', { 'PRIVATE-TOKEN': myGitLab.key })
gitHub('get', 'search/repositories', { q: `user:${myGitHub.user}` })
  .then(console.log)
gitLab('get', `users/${myGitLab.user}/projects`)
  .then(console.log)

Instead of making separate functions that would almost be duplicates with only slight variations, I create one function and partially apply it with the base URL and Auth headers, so that I can re-use those for different end-points of the API and add arbitrary data to those.

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