reducer

I was recently mentoring someone who had trouble with the .reduce() method in JavaScript. Namely, how you get from this:

const nums = [1, 2, 3]
let value = 0

for (let i = 0; i < nums.length; i++) {
  value += nums[i]
}

...to this:

const nums = [1, 2, 3]
const value = nums.reduce((ac, next) => ac + next, 0)

They are functionally equivalent and they both sum up all the numbers in the array, but there is a bit of paradigm shift between them. Let's explore reducers for a moment because they're powerful, and important to have in your programming toolbox. There are literally hundreds of other articles on reducers out there, and I'll link up some of my favorites at the end.

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