Functions are Objects: the other point of view

Wednesday 21 August 2013 at 17:15 BST

There's a feature in Java 8 which nicely embodies one of the differences between the class-oriented structure of Java and functional languages. It lies in the way you implement lambdas.

You might have seen the syntax already. It looks something like this:

List<Integer> numbers = ImmutableList.of(2, 9, 8, 3);
List<Integer> squares = numbers.stream()
                            .map(x -> x * x)
                            .collect(toList());
assertThat(squares, contains(4, 81, 64, 9));

It's quite pretty, and means there's a separation between the lazy functional stuff and the normal collections interfaces. But have you wondered at all what the signature of Stream::map is?

Turns out it takes an object, like every other method in Java.

<R> Stream<R> map(Function<? super T, ? extends R> mapper);

That Function is java.util.function.Function, an interface with one abstract method, R apply(T t). In this case, x -> x * x is an implementation of that Function interface. But it doesn't have to be.

Let's look at another example:

List<Integer> numbers = ImmutableList.of(2, 9, 8, 3);
List<Integer> odds = numbers.stream()
                          .filter(x -> x % 2 == 1)
                          .collect(toList());
assertThat(odds, contains(9, 3));

The signature of filter is as follows:

Stream<T> filter(Predicate<? super T> predicate);

This time, my lambda was converted into an implementation of Predicate. Same syntax, same number of parameters, but it has a different type. How did the compiler know how to do that? C# uses one type for both. Functions are of type Func<T, U>, and predicates are simply Func<T, bool>.

It turns out the Java 8 lambda folk decided that their implementation of a function object shouldn't be special. After all, plenty have existed before in libraries such as Guava and Functional Java. So they came up with a heuristic instead: any interface or abstract class with a single abstract method is considered a functional interface and can be implictly implemented by a lambda expression. This means that lambdas really are objects like (almost) everything else in Java. Functions aren't special; classes and objects are the building blocks of the programming language, and the functional aspects of it are designed with that in mind.

Naming

Naming is important. There's a new interface in Java 8 called java.util.function.Supplier, which has one method:

T get();

That's it. You implement it like this:

final String words = "lots of words";
Supplier<String> lastWord = () -> words.substring(words.lastIndexOf(' ') + 1);

You can make it more complicated, returning something else if the string is empty or only has one word, for example. This serves my point well though. It's obvious that I can use this to pass around any function that takes no arguments but returns something. By that logic, a Future is a Supplier—it takes nothing and returns a value when you call the get method. Why do I need a Future interface? (Let's ignore its other methods for now.)

It's because they're conceptually different. Futures are not necessarily suppliers, and you might want to treat them differently. Even if you don't, giving different names to separate concepts generally helps you keep your code base sane.

Here's another one:

interface Builder<T> {
    T build();
}

Not a supplier. I'm going to have lots of methods on my builder, of which build is just one, and I want it to be called exactly that. Not get, build, because it explains nicely what's happening.

And if I want to convert, well, that's easy:

gimmeASupplier(() -> builder.build());

And thanks to method references, we can even short-circuit that:

gimmeASupplier(builder::build);

(Ask me about method references some time.)

And as a bonus

Funnily enough, Guava's Function type is a functional interface too.

public interface Function<F, T> {
    @Nullable T apply(@Nullable F input);
}

So if I'm already using Guava and want to keep at it, there's no problem. This works just fine:

Iterables.transform(numbers, x -> x * x);

Backwards-compatibility is a lovely thing when it's done right. Lambdas in Java have been a long time coming, but now they're just around the corner and I'm really looking forward to them.

If you want to experiment with lambdas, download the early access release. The latest versions of IntelliJ IDEA have great support for Java 8 with lambdas.