Saturday, July 5, 2014

Exercism: "Extract-Transform-Load in Clojure"

This is my solution to the Extract-Transform-Load problem in Clojure.

I wrote several working versions in the REPL but this is the one that I finally submitted to Exercism as my first iteration:


I used destructuring to extract the letters and score from the key-value pair which reduce was passing to the anonymous helper.

It works but it's not very readable.

In the second iteration I introduced a helper function, assoc-pairs, to improve its readability but the naming was still bad:


So I renamed some parameters and helper functions for the third iteration:


I find that, even though, using the let form to create the local bindings that gave names to the internal helper functions, associate-score-to-letters and associate-score-to-letter helps to reveal the intention of each helper function, it also creates a "parentheses vortex" that can obscure the code at the same time.

I wish Clojure would let me define these local functions just nesting the function definitions inside the enclosing function, like the functions sqrt_iter, good_enough? and improve defined inside custom_sqrt in this Scheme example (I coded it using DrRacket):


I think that a feature like that would help to make my Clojure solution easier to read.

You can nitpick my solution here or see all the exercises I've done so far in this repository.

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