Jon's Programming Blog

I was trying to figure out the best way to have functions be both compatible with an object oriented paradigm and a functional oriented paradigm when working on objects. My implementations are probably naive, but instructive nevertheless. It seems that lo-dash and other libraries have done a good job bridging those worlds.

Let’s say you have an object O such that

function O(a, b){
  this.a = a
  this.b = b
}

var o = function(a, b){
  return new O(a, b)
}

Now, you want to extend the object but you also want the option to use the object in a more fuctional way with compose.

Let’s start with a simple display method.

var display = function(thisArg){
  var o_ = thisArg || this
  console.log(o_)
  return o_
}

Then a method to change a property.*

var change = function(property){
  return function(value, thisArg){
  	var o_ = _.cloneDeep(thisArg || this)
    o_[property] = value
    return o_
  }
}

Now we can set property to:

var changeA = change('a')

Then we can add changeA to the O object and use it.

O.prototype.changeA = changeA
var o_ = o(1, 2)
o_.changeA(3).display()

Or we can use a functional approach.

var o_ = o(1, 2)
_.compose(display, _.curry(changeA)(3))(o_)
//OR
_.compose(display, _.partialRight(changeA, o_))(3)
//OR
_.compose(display, changeA)(3, o_)

I think I like the functional approach for the more abstract functions and the OO approach as your code becomes more specific. The functional evangelists say the functional style is better because it leads to more reusable code. Which I would agree with, since you are not tying your code up with an object you can then easily extend your model to various other objects, without the use of inheritance and other OO monsters. I think I will use a hybrid approach with bilby.js library which uses polymorphism.

By the way, what I just did with change is similar to lenses.

* An alternative to this would be using a partial function, which would make the original function more flexible.

var change = function(property, value, thisArg){
  	var o_ = _.cloneDeep(thisArg || this)
    o_[property] = value
    return o_
  }
}

Now we can set property to:

var changeA = _.partial(change, 'a')

Or using combinators (not strict).

var set = function(property, value){
  this[property] = value
  return this
}

var change = function(f, value, thisArg){
  	var o_ = _.cloneDeep(thisArg || this)
    o_ = f.apply(o_, [value])
    return o_
  }
}

Now we can set property to:

var changeA = _.partial(change
              , _.partial(set, 'a'))