Composing Software

Transducers

Prior to taking on transducers, you should first have a strong understanding of both reducers and function composition.

Transduce: Derived from the 17th century scientific latin, “transductionem” means “to change over, convert”. It is further derived from “transducere/traducere”, which means “to lead along or across, transfer”.

A transducer is a composable higher order reducer. It takes a reducer as input, and returns another reducer.

Transducers are:

• Composable using simple function composition
• Efficient for large collections with multiple operations: Only enumerates over the collection once, regardless of the number of operations in the pipeline
• Able to transduce over any enumerable source (e.g., arrays, trees, streams, graphs, ...