An oldie but a goodie… Bart De Smet presents MinLINQ - The Essence of LINQ

“Before reaching the catharsis in the “More LINQ with System.Interactive” series over here, I wanted to ensure a solid understanding of the essence of LINQ in my reader base. Often people forget the true essence of a technology due to the large number of auxiliary frameworks and extensions that are being provided. Or worse, sometimes a sense for the essence never materialized.

Searching for essence is nothing other than a “group by” operation, partitioning the world in fundamentals and derived portions. One succeeds in this mission if the former group is much smaller than the latter. In this post, we’ll try to reach that point for the IEnumerable<T> and IObservable<T> LINQ implementations, illustrating both are fundamentally similar (and dare I say, dual?). You can already guess much of the essence lies in the concept of monads. By the end of the post, we’ll have distilled the core of LINQ, which I refer to as MinLINQ since small is beautiful.

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Conclusion

Boiling down LINQ to its core essence can be fun and a great eye-opener to many users of the technology. While optimizations often mandate a lower degree of layering, it’s good to have an idea of the conceptual layering of various operators to see which ones are essential and which ones are not so much. If kids can build castles out of Lego blocks, sure every self-respecting developer should be able to exploit the expressive power a few primitive building blocks to create great libraries and applications. Choosing the right set of primitives can get you a long way in such a design, as illustrated in this post. Readers who can’t get enough of essential primitives and the composition thereof are cordially invited to have a go at another Crazy Sunday post titled Unlambda .NET – With a Big Dose of C# 3.0 Lambdas (and many others in that category).

In the continuation of my “More LINQ with System.Interactive” series we’ll get back to less academic stuff with System.Interactive. And before I forget: a happy 2010!”

Originally posted 1/1/2010 (yes, 2010), but just republished today on DZone (The Essence of LINQ – MinLINQ); seeing that I hadn’t referenced it then and that Bart’s one of my favorite posters, I thought it easily worth a post. Never hurts to get a review in every now and then…