generic-methods v0.0.2

generic-methods

generic-methods is a generic methods library for JS. It's designed to help create composable polymorphic functions either from scratch or by lifting from existing classes.

Other existing generic methods implementations tend to try to emulate CLOS generic functions semantics which I don't really want (nor like), so I wrote this.

Usage

$ npm install --save generic-methods

In your .js file:

const Package = require('generic-methods');

Rationale

Imagine you're developing a polymorphic map() function. Suppose you want it to be able to map over arrays and objects and maybe even strings. You could approach implementing such a function like this in a vanilla JS:

function map(collection, func) {
    if (collection instanceof Array) {
        return collection.map(func);
    } else if (typeof(collection) === 'string') {
        return collection.split('').map(func).join('');
    } else {
        let result = {};
        Object.keys(collection).forEach(key => {
            result[key] = func(collection[key]);
        });
        return result;
    }
}

That's pretty dense, but it works. And yet it's somewhat difficult to extend. What if next time you implement a LinkedList class and want to map over it, too? You'd have to introduce yet another else if clause in your code. After several iterations the code will simply become unreadable.

Ideally, you could easily solve this OOP way by making every class whose instances you want to map over implement a common interface, say, Mappable. Obviously, you can't do that since Array and String and Object are standard library classes. If you feel hacky you might monkey patch them, but that'd be gross and could break third party libraries.

Generic methods provide an elegant solution to this problem by decoupling objects from actions they can perform. It's still OOP, but methods aren't properties anymore, they exist somewhere outside of the object and yet are dispatched as needed when needed.

This is how you'd approach the problem with generic-methods:

const Package = require('generic-methods');

const package = new Package();

package.define('map', Array, (self, func) => {
    return self.map(func);
});

package.define('map', 'string', (self, func) => {
    return self.split('').map(func).join('');
});

package.define('map', Object, (self, func) => {
    let result = {};
    Object.keys(self).forEach(key => {
        result[key] = func(self[key]);
    });
    return result;
});

And this is how you'd use it:

const { map } = package.bindings;

const twice = x => x + x;

console.log(map([1, 2, 3], twice)); // [2, 4, 6]

console.log(map('sausage', twice)); // 'ssaauussaaggee'

console.log(map({ foo: 1, bar: 2 }, twice)); // { foo: 2, bar: 4 }

Extending your new map() to support more classes is trivial, and you can even scope implementation of map() for you class within its module, just make sure package is visible from there.

generic-methods also provides a facility for lifting methods from existing classes, that is extracting them in a package as stand-alone functions that accept class instance as a first argument. It's ridiculously simple:

const liftedArray = new Package('LiftedArray');

liftedArray.lift(Array);

// Now Array.prototype methods are available from liftedArray.bindings

const { reverse } = liftedArray.binings;

console.log(reverse([1, 2, 3])); // [3, 2, 1]