alt Hacker News> `fold` is awesome and super useful. It's the easiest and most convenient way to turn a collection into a single value.
You will eventually learn about something called "for loop", and it will be nice.
Replies
mrkeen • today at 6:32 PM
Nah. It involves multiple passes and setting the answer to the wrong value before (hopefully) setting it to the right value.
Plus it forces you out of whatever lazy/streaming paradigm you had going on. If your foldr produces a list, downstream can start consuming it in constant memory as long as you let it do its thing.
➕ show 1 reply
There are way more places where a simple typo will ruin you in a for loop than a reduce or fold or map. Using briefer abstractions in place of nested loops is almost always preferable.