Specter ⚡️
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is simply one of the most powerful libraries and I agree with its tagline .
an amazing talk from the author, where he explains his rationale behind the need for such a framework. If you are dealing with data structures, you'd want to use specter as it exposes a simple API for working with them which is easily extensible. There are many examples in the as well as .
It is batteries included to work with most structures, and the whole power of it comes from a simple .
Here's a short version:
s/select or s/transform cover most of the use cases. Whatever the scenario, you are almost always navigating to a place in a data structure and use(select) it or manipulate(transform) it. So what actually specter is its
A protocol which is an interface to implement a navigator and it provides efficient means to compose those together.
Keywords here being: navigator and compose.
Defining the navigator is just implementing a protocol which is how to do rest of selection/transformation from the sub value from this current point. Here's an implementation of a keypath navigator which navigates/transforms to a key in a map(parameterised by akey)
The select* part of the code is saying, "this is the thing you need to do(get) to extract the sub-structure(sub-value) that is needed and apply the next-fn." Similarly, transform* it says, "this is how you apply a transformation(next-fn) on the current structure".
And violà; this idea is applied to every and the best part is, it's completely agnostic to the structure and next-fn, making it a composable framework.
I think it really helps to think where can I get the data, and what I'll do with it than worrying about how to repack the data into a specific format(de-coupling navigation and repacking). More about performance . It can be as good or better than using the default functions.
