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Ramda vs Underscore: What are the differences?
## Introduction
This Markdown code presents the key differences between Ramda and Underscore, two popular JavaScript libraries commonly used in functional programming.
1. **Functional Programming Paradigm**: Ramda is designed purely for functional programming, emphasizing immutability and side-effect-free functions, while Underscore offers a mix of functional programming utilities along with object-oriented programming support.
2. **Automatic Data-last Method Signatures**: Ramda follows the functional programming convention of keeping the data parameter last in its method signatures, whereas Underscore adheres to traditional JavaScript conventions with data as the first parameter.
3. **Automatic Currying of Functions**: Ramda functions are automatically curried by default, allowing for easier partial application, while Underscore functions are not natively curried, requiring explicit calls to curry functions.
4. **Chaining vs Composition**: Underscore provides chaining methods for easier method sequencing, while Ramda emphasizes function composition as a primary approach for creating complex functions by combining simpler ones.
5. **Separate Utility Functions vs Methods on the Prototype**: Underscore adds utility functions directly to the `\_` global object, requiring them to be invoked with `_.`, while Ramda requires importing functions individually or as a whole for use, ensuring a cleaner namespace.
6. **Dynamic vs Static Typing**: Ramda is designed with type signatures for its functions, making it more suitable for statically typed languages and enhancing development with strong type support, whereas Underscore lacks this feature and is more dynamic in nature.
In Summary, the key differences between Ramda and Underscore lie in their functional programming paradigms, method signatures, currying, function composition, utility function accessibility, and type system integration.
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) provides standard data objects in JSON format for the healthcare industry. Since JSON objects are hierarchical and tree-like, we had a need to defensively 'pluck' fields from our JSON objects and do lots of mapping. We tried jQuery and Underscore and a few other technologies like FHIRPath; but Lodash has been the most well supported, works in the most contexts, has the cleanest syntax, etc. We particularly like the ES6 version of Lodash, where we can import
the method names directly, without resorting to * or _ syntax. We got hooked on the 'get' function to defensively pluck fields from objects without crashing our user interface, and have found countless uses for the other lodash functions throughout our apps.
Lodash is great for developing and optimizing algorithms.
Pros of Ramda
- Automatically curried2
- Point free programming1
Pros of Underscore
- Utility85
- Simple55
- Functional programming40
- Fast32
- Open source28
- Backbone20
- Javascript16
- Annotated source code8
- Library6