Oh, you think JSON is your ally? I do a lot work with JSON. So much so that my favourite library is a JSON parsing library (cheshire). The most tedious thing about working wiht JSON is pulling keys out of JSON objects over and over again.

Associative destructuring is the hero we need but don’t deserve. It’s syntactic sugar for extracting keys from an object in a way that makes code more readable. More readable code is more maintainable code. It’s made my life much easier.

Given the following map, that was created by parsing a JSON object using cheshire:

(def json-object {:fname "Alexander" :lname "Oloo" :handle "alekcz" :location "ZA"})

The standard approach to using data from within the map is as follows:

(defn twitter-link [user]
    (str "<a href='https://twitter.com/" (:handle user) "'>" (:fname user) " (@" (:handle user) ")</a>")))
(println (twitter-link json-object))
; => <a href='https://twitter.com/'>Alexander (@alekcz)</a>

But when we use associative destructuring we get:

(defn twitter-link [user]
    (let [{:keys [fname handle]} user]
        (str "<a href='https://twitter.com/" handle "'>" fname " (@" handle ")</a>")))
(println (twitter-link json-object))
; => <a href='https://twitter.com/'>Alexander (@alekcz)</a>

Isn’t that so much nicer? I think it is. It’s a pity I didn’t see transit until I was already a man.

May your build always pass.

Alex

This post is part of the "Advent of Parens".