Ep 032: Call Me Lazy

Functional Design in Clojure

Christoph finds map doesn't let him be lazy enough.

• Last week, we were dealing with multi-line sprinkle errors.
• We were able to get more context using partition.
• (01:33) Problem: the component lines had to be adjacent.
• Solution last week was to create larger partitions to hopefully get the rest of the error.
• This became a magic number problem, guessing how far we had to look ahead.
• "If there's anything I've learned in my career, telling the future is one of the hardest things to do.'
• What number should be big enough? 100? 1000?
• (04:00) The other problem is that the function is handed a pre-selected set of lines.
• The decision about how many lines is appropriate is made outside the function.
• Wouldn't it be nice if the function had control over how far to look ahead.
• "The function can't function."
• "Functions are all we've got in functional programming. Well, that and lists."
• It would be great if the function itself could take a sequence and look as far as it needs to.
• How about handing the function the entire lazy sequence?
• (05:52) Problem: Handing in the entire sequence means we can't use map to convert lines into sprinkle errors anymore.
• We can write a function that gives us just one sprinkle error from the sequence, but we want to convert the sequence into a sequence of all the sprinkle errors.
• We're going from something that operates on a subset of the sequence to something that operates on the entire sequence, which is too much control.
• We need a way for it to look ahead but still
• It's no longer just working on a chunk of the sequence, but on the unbounded sequence itself.
• We need to elevate it to the same power as other sequence operators, like map and filter.
• We don't, however, want the function to eagerly find all sprinkle errors in the sequence. It needs to be lazy.
• (09:26) Solution 1: How can we just get one sprinkle error out?
  1. If the first line isn't the error start, recur with the tail until found.
  2. Do a take-while to find the second half of the error.
  3. When both found, return the value.
• We need to terminate the search if we hit the end of the sequence, so we only continue if (seq lines) is not nil.
• "There's no sense in looking in an empty bucket."
• But we don't want just one, we want the entire sequence.
• It would be really nice to return the value when we find it and then wait to find the next one until it is requested.
• Conceptually, we could tell the calling function an index of where to start looking for the next error.
• (13:44) Solution: In Clojure, we keep our place using the lazy-seq function.
• lazy-seq is a sequence, but it hasn't been realized yet.
• It's like being able to hand back a value and a function to call for the next value.
• When you find a value, you can cons it onto the head of an invocation of lazy-seq to make a new sequence.
• Step 1. Wrap your entire function body in lazy-seq.
• This is similar to using delay, because it wraps the code in something that will only be evaluated when it is first accessed.
• Step 2. Ensure that the body obeys the contract. It must return either:
  • nil, which indicates that the sequence is complete.
  • a sequence, usually constructed by calling cons on a value and a call to lazy-seq.
• Top of the body is a call to (when (seq lines) ..., to ensure that the sequence terminates when there is no data left.
• Since the top of our function is lazy-seq, we can cons the found value onto a recursive call to the function.
• In the recursive call, we must pass the next section of the sequence, so that when evaluated it will pick up at the right place.
• If we don't find the start of the error, we recurse with the rest of the sequence to try parsing from there.
• This function will go through the sequence eagerly until it finds something.
• Instead of operating on single elements in the sequence, we can take a sequence and produce a sequence, powered by lazy-seq.
• With this capability, you can build a higher level sequence that consumes this sequence and produces a new summary, all done lazily.

Related episodes:

• 028: Fail Donut
• 029: Problem Unknown: Log Lines
• 030: Lazy Does It
• 031: Eager Abstraction

Clojure in this episode:

• partition
• seq, cons, rest
• lazy-seq, delay
• map, filter, take-while
• recur

Code sample from this episode:

(ns devops.week-04  (:require  [devops.week-01 :refer [parse-line]]  [devops.week-02 :refer [process-log]]  [devops.week-03 :refer [sprinkle-errors-by-type]]  ))  (defn sprinkle-error-seq  [lines]  (lazy-seq  (when (seq lines)  (let [[first-line second-line & tail] lines  [_whole donut-id] (some->> first-line :log/message (re-matches #"failed to add sprinkle to donut (\d+)"))  [_whole error] (some->> second-line :log/message (re-matches #"sprinkle fail reason: (.*)"))]  (if (and donut-id error)  (cons (merge first-line  {:kind :sprinkle  :sprinkle/donut-id donut-id  :sprinkle/error error})  (sprinkle-error-seq tail))  (sprinkle-error-seq (next lines)))))))   (comment  (process-log "sample.log" #(->> % (map parse-line) sprinkle-error-seq doall))  (process-log "sample.log" #(->> % (map parse-line) sprinkle-error-seq sprinkle-errors-by-type))  )