A quick introduction to pipe() and compose() in JavaScript

Functional programming’s been quite the eye-opening journey for me. This post, and posts like it, are an attempt to share my insights and perspectives as I trek new functional programming lands.

Ramda’s been my go-to FP library because of how much easier it makes functional programming in JavaScript. I highly recommend it.

Composing blocks to form a structure. Pretty deep stuff…

Pipe

The concept of pipe is simple — it combines n functions. It’s a pipe flowing left-to-right, calling each function with the output of the last one.

Let’s write a function that returns someone’s name.

getName = (person) => person.name
getName({ name: 'Buckethead' })
// 'Buckethead'

Let’s write a function that uppercases strings.

uppercase = (string) => string.toUpperCase()
uppercase('Buckethead')
// 'BUCKETHEAD'

So if we wanted to get and capitalize person's name, we could do this:

name = getName({ name: 'Buckethead' })
uppercase(name)
// 'BUCKETHEAD'

That’s fine but let’s eliminate that intermediate variable name.

uppercase(getName({ name: 'Buckethead' }))