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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Reduce: Not Scary


;; Three very fundamental operators in any sort of programming are map, filter
;; and reduce.

;; They represent the common programming tasks of transforming a collection,
;; selecting from it, and summing over it.

;; Most people think that map and filter are fairly obvious, but there seems to
;; be a certain amount of confusion about reduce.

;; But it's actually very simple in concept, and represents an easy idea.


;; Often one needs to loop over a collection, and store results in an
;; accumulator.

;; The simplest example of a reduction would be adding the numbers in a list.

;; Suppose the numbers are 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 and we want to find their sum

;; In C, or another naturally imperative language, we'd say:

;; int list[]={1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10};

;; int len=10;

;; int a=0;
;; int i;

;; for (i=0; i<len; i++){
;;      a += list[i];
;; }

;; Using atoms to provide mutable state, we can do something similar in Clojure:


(def lst '(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10))
(def len 10)

(def a (atom 0))

(dotimes [i len]
      (swap! a + (nth lst i)))


;; The value ends up in the atom a, just as in the C version.

;; In clojure, this looks slightly more complicated.

;; Partly because mutation in clojure is intrinsically more complicated, because
;; clojure is extremely concerned with thread safety, and so we need to allocate 
;; and dereference atoms rather than mutating local variables.

;; And partly because C has very good notations for its fundamental operations.

;; But logically they're the same algorithm.


;; But I'd feel dirty writing this code in clojure, even though that would have
;; been a perfectly good piece of LISP in the sixties. It's just a feeling that
;; I have that it is better to avoid mutation unless it's actually necessary.

;; Even though the mutation-less algorithms are often harder to write, they're
;; often easier to debug and test.

;; A more natural way to accumulate over a list in clojure is the 
;; loop-as-function-call, with accumulator and iterator as parameters:


(loop [a 0 i 0]
  (if (= i len) a
  (recur (+ a (nth lst i)) (inc i))))

;; This is much more idiomatic code in clojure, and it doesn't mutate any values
;; even though the variable-rebinding in the recur call produces a very similar

;; effect.

;; And here the final value is the value of the expression, which is nicer.

;; Of course, clojure's lists know when they are empty, so we don't need an
;; explicit loop counter.

;; So how about:
(loop [a 0 l lst]
  (if (empty? l) a
      (recur (+ a (first l)) (rest l))))


;; l moves along the list, while a accumulates the values.

;; It still looks a bit long-winded, but we can easily imagine that this is a
;; common pattern:
(loop [a _ l _]
  (if (empty? l) a
      (recur (_ a (first l)) (rest l))))


;; Where the blanks represent holes in the boilerplate we have to fill in.

;; It should be almost as common as the equivalent pattern:

;; a= _ 
;; for(i=0; i<_; i++)
;; { 
;;   a _= _ [i] 
;; } 


;; is in C.

;; Where in both cases we need to fill in the _ with the initial value of the
;; accumulator, the list to be accumulated over, and the operation to be
;; performed.

;; Pretty much the first law of programming is:
;; If you see a common pattern, you should name it and abstract it so it goes away.

;; The pattern is called reduce. 


;; We need to fill in the blanks with the function to do the accumulating,
;; the initial value of the accumulator, and the list

;; Since we're reducing the list lst, using the operation +, and starting 
;; with the value zero, we write:

(reduce + 0 lst)

;; reduce is clojure's natural way of expressing accumulation over a list

;; in the same way as the for-loop over += and ++ is C's

;; Here are some other examples

(reduce * 1 lst) 

;; We use * instead of +, and start with 1 instead of 0
;; This produces the product of the numbers in the list.

;; In these cases where the order of the arguments doesn't matter

;; we can think of reduce as 'put the function between the values'

(reduce + 0 '(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)) ; (0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10)
(reduce * 1 '(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)) ; (1 * 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * ........)

;; But this image is actually harmful when the ordering does matter.

;; What's really going on is that the operator is being used to feed values
;; into the accumulator one by one.

(reduce + 0 '(1 2 3))   
;; proceeds like:
;; (+ 0 1) -> 1
;;         (+ 1 2) -> 3

;;                 (+ 3 3) -> 6

;; If this seems confusing, even though you're happy with the C version,
;; think about the C loop.

;; They're actually just different ways of expressing the same idea,
;; and should look equally natural. Seeing how either one can always be 
;; transformed into the other will help.


;; Here's an example where the order does matter:
(reduce conj '() '(1 2 3))

;; How do we think about this?
(conj '()  1)   ; -> '(1)
               (conj '(1) 2)   ; -> '(2 1)

                              (conj '(2 1) 3) ; -> '(3 2 1)

;; So 
(reduce conj '() '(1 2 3)) -> '(3 2 1)


;; Of course this simple reduction is so common that the pattern 
;; (reduce conj '() _ ) already has a name

(reverse '( 1 2 3 ))

;; Here's the definition of reverse in the clojure.core source code!
(defn reverse
  "Returns a seq of the items in coll in reverse order. Not lazy."

  {:added "1.0"}
  [coll]
    (reduce conj () coll))


;; An acceptable definition of reduce itself would be:

(defn my-reduce [fn init coll]
  (loop [acc init l (seq coll)]
    (if (empty? l) acc
        (recur (fn acc (first l)) (rest l)))))


;; This works on any collection that can be made into a sequence:
(my-reduce * 1 '(1 2 3)) ;; a list
(my-reduce * 1 #{1,2,3}) ;; a set
(my-reduce * 1  [1,2,3]) ;; a vector

;; The real reduce in clojure.core is an optimised version and can deal with all
;; sorts of collections efficiently, but in spirit it is just making every
;; collection into a sequence and then doing what my little skeleton above did.


;; It also has another feature, which is that if you don't provide an initial
;; value for the accumulator, then it takes the first element of the sequence as
;; its initial value, and accumulates over the rest of the sequence.

;; For operations which produce answers of the same type as their arguments,
;; this is often what you want.

(reduce * '(1 2 3 4)) ;24 

(reduce +  [1 2 3 4])  ;10
(reduce bit-xor '(1 2 3 4 5)) ;1

;; So why has this simple operation got a scary reputation?

;; I think it's because all the common cases are so useful that they have

;; already been further abstracted away, like reverse.  So in fact you don't
;; meet it that often in practice.

;; Let's see if we can construct something more interesting:

;; Suppose you had a list of strings

(def strlist '("fred" "barney" "fred" "wilma"))


;; And wanted to count how many times each string occurs in the list.

;; We want an accumulator to keep the strings and counts in, and a function
;; which will take that accumulator, and a new string, and return the updated
;; accumulator.

;; The obvious accumulator is a map. We'd want the answer to be something like
{"fred" 2, "barney" 1, "wilma" 1}


;; So what function will add strings to a map?  

;;In a rather naive and long-winded way:

(defn addtomap [map string]
  (let [oldval
        (if (contains? map string) 
          (map string) 
          0)]
        (assoc map string (inc oldval))))


;; Here's how we'd use it to count our list, starting from the empty map {}, and
;; using addtomap to add each string into the accumulator returned by each call.
(addtomap {} "fred")                      ;; {"fred" 1}
(addtomap {"fred" 1} "barney")            ;; {"barney" 1, "fred" 1}

(addtomap {"fred" 1, "barney" 1} "fred")  ;; {"fred" 2, "barney" 1}
(addtomap {"fred" 2, "barney" 1} "wilma") ;; {"wilma" 1, "fred" 2, "barney" 1}


;; So the reduce part is obvious, once you have addtomap

(reduce addtomap {} strlist)

;; But a real Clojure programmer would look at addtomap and think:

;; We can write (map string 0) instead of 
;; (if (contains? map string) 
;;           (map string) 

;;           0)

;; So a better version of addtomap would be:

(defn addtomap [map string]
  (let [oldval (map string 0)]
        (assoc map string (inc oldval))))

(reduce addtomap {} strlist)


;; And now the let statement looks redundant, so let's say
(defn addtomap [map string]
  (assoc map string (inc (map string 0))))

(reduce addtomap {} strlist)


;; And then he might say 
;; "since I'm only going to use this function here, why not make it anonymous?"
(fn [map string] (assoc map string (inc (map string 0))))


;; And now the reduce looks like:
(reduce (fn [map string] (assoc map string (inc (map string 0)))) {} strlist)


;; And, well, at this point, any reasonable man is going to think:
;; "Since I'm writing a one-liner, I might as well use the anonymous shorthand"

#(assoc %1 %2 (inc (%1 %2 0)))

(reduce #(assoc %1 %2 (inc (%1 %2 0))) {} strlist)


;; And if you already understand reduce and anonymous functions, and how maps
;; work, this is actually not too hard to understand.

;; In fact this is the version of the function that I originally wrote.

;; But I can see it might be a bit off-putting if you thought reduce itself was
;; scary. 

;; Actually the obfuscation / pleasing terseness is all in the anonymous
;; function, and the behaviour of maps, and the reduce bit isn't scary at all.


;; Here's another deliberately obscure example, using a little structure as an
;; accumulator.  See if you can figure out what it does using the above ideas to
;; unpack it. I'm using the destructuring notation to take the little structure
;; apart, and then the function modifies each part and puts them back together again

(reduce (fn[[c s] n] [(+ c n), (str s n)]) [0,""] lst)


;; The trick is to work out what the anonymous function does to the starting 
;; value of the accumulator when it gets a value from the list.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

;; Clojure's natural facility with abstractions and small functions allows
;; some truly terse code.

;; This little piece of code counts words in a file and orders them by popularity:

(sort #(< (%1 1) (%2 1)) 
      (reduce #(assoc %1 %2 (inc (%1 %2 0))) {}
       (clojure.contrib.string/split 
        #"\W" 
        (slurp "/home/john/hobby-code/reduce.clj"))))


;; With practice this sort of thing is actually readable. Promise!

;; But if I was actually writing it for someone else to read, 
;; I'd probably split it up and give the bits names.

(let [filecontents (slurp "/home/john/hobby-code/reduce.clj")
      words        (clojure.contrib.string/split #"\W" filecontents)
      wordmap      (reduce #(assoc %1 %2 (inc (%1 %2 0))) {}  words)
      sortedwords  (sort #(< (%1 1) (%2 1)) wordmap)]
  sortedwords)


;; And if I knew the library, I'd remember that two of those little operations
;; actually already have names:

;; The idiom
( reduce #(assoc %1 %2 (inc (%1 %2 0)) {} .... )

;; which I used to find myself writing all the time, is such a useful thing 
;; that it too has made it into clojure.core as the function frequencies:


(frequencies strlist)

;; and the sort with the comparator on the second elements can be replaced by sort-by, and second

(let [filecontents (slurp "/home/john/hobby-code/reduce.clj")
      words        (clojure.contrib.string/split #"\W" filecontents)
      wordmap      (frequencies words)
      sortedwords  (sort-by second wordmap)]
  sortedwords)


;; And then I'd abstract away the word counting operations from the file reading part

(defn sorted-word-frequencies [string]
  (sort-by second (frequencies
                   (clojure.contrib.string/split #"\W+" string))))

;; So now I can ask for the 10 most popular words:

(take 10 (reverse (sorted-word-frequencies (slurp "/home/john/hobby-code/reduce.clj"))))

;; which is also pleasingly terse, but I think more readable.




  


19 comments:

  1. Thank you, nice explanation!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Two things I noticed by looking over your code (really quickly)

    1. instaid of (empty? list) you should use (seq list) because (seq list) returns nil if the item is not a sequence. Its standard clojure style, it's wierd first because it turnes true and false but its better because you don't have to filter for nil sepretly.

    2. Look at let-if

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is so hard to read! A proper blog post with only the code snippets in code-blocks would have been nice.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Regarding legibility, besides some overflow for long comments, I think it's fine. Reading well-commented Clojure source is fun.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Shantanu, simrpgman

    I wonder if it might be browser dependent. For me it looks gorgeous in firefox, but horrible in google chrome. It might be as simple as the choice of font.

    I can feel a program to turn clojure files into blogger compatible html whilst breaking out the comments into ordinary text coming on.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Subject, sample code and narrative style I found very useful in my quest to understand and us Clojure; I look forward to more blog entries like this; thanks;

    ReplyDelete
  7. Can you explain the (map string 0) part above? How does the compiler know you're not using the map fn?

    user=> (map "fred" 0)
    java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Don't know how to create
    ISeq from: java.lang.Integer

    I guess this is what's intended:

    user=> ({"fred" 1} "fred" 0)
    1

    but I don't understand what's going on here either. Why does ({"fred" 1} "fred" 0) return 1 but ({} "fred" 0) return 0?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hmm. I bothered people on IRC and read the docs and, lo and behold, maps as functions take two args. The second arg is what to return if there's no match.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Sorry, Ed, that was me absent-mindedly using map as a local variable (and thus hiding the global map function).

    Bad style on my part (because it's confusing) and particularly funny in a post which starts with a sentence about map, filter and reduce...

    ReplyDelete
  10. In the REPL, I try this:

    user> (def characterList '("fred" "betty" "wilma" "rubble" "fred" "fred"))
    #'user/characterList
    user> (reduce (fn[[c s] n] [(+ c n), (str s n)]) [0, ""] characterList)

    And I get:

    java.lang.String cannot be cast to java.lang.Number
    [Thrown class java.lang.ClassCastException]


    How does this work?

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hi Lawrence, you're trying to add n="fred" to c=0. You probably want to replace (+ c n) with an expression like (+ c (count n)).

    ReplyDelete
  12. Wow! Great post. I had a mini-enlightenment about reduce when I read "Often one needs to loop over a collection, and store results in an accumulator." Nice! It just got better from there.

    In your example, "(loop [acc _ l _] (if (empty? l) a (recur (_ a (first l)) (rest l))))" I think you have a typo. Either you need to rename "acc" to just "a" or rename "a" to "acc."

    ReplyDelete
  13. Thanks for the explination of the word counting function. I am quite new to clojure and I have been breaking my mind to understand this function. Finally I have seen the light :)...I think it's worth mentioning that the key element in the function is the way how the value of a map is derived...a simple form in the way of ({"Test" 1} "Test") will give us a result of 1...it says basically show me the value of "Test" and that is in this exp 1 ..for newcomers like me this is important to understand otherwise the mentioned function will not be understood.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Showing various functionally identical versions, and discussing what is idiomatic or not, and what is still idiomatic, but more readable, was very helpful to me. Also showing the process of composing these somewhat dense expressions helped me see how I might get there myself.

    ReplyDelete

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