JavaScript Patterns — Wrangling arrays like a boss, with Array#reduce 👊

I personally feel that in this case the improved code can be more readable and doesn't need any other libraries by using full es6 potential

nodes
.map(node => node.followers.map(user => user.email))    // get all emails in a format [['abc@abc.com', 'ijk@ijk.com'...], ['abc@abc.com', ...], ...]
.reduce((emails, result) => [...emails, ...result], []) // flatMap like function, flat all the arrays into one
.filter((email, i, self) => self.indexOf(email) === i)  // get all uniq items
.filter(mail => mail)                                   // remove undefined or null

https://jsfiddle.net/ae1nof9p/

For what it's worth I actually think you older code is more readable, here is how I would have improved it:

const followers = (nodes) => {
  return _(nodes)
    .flatMap( node => node.followers)
    .filter( follower => follower.email)
    .map( follower => follower.email)
    .uniq()
}

I think some would disagree with this, but I personally favour readability in code and I think your old code is easier to reason about. As a bonus, the time required to complete this also faster.

Hi there. Nice article! Indeed, reduce is always a better choice than more generic methods, like forEach or map/filter combinations for cases when you need to generate one single value or object. And more importantly, it improves readability of your code, as your fellow developer knows right aways what's going on.For this specific case, I have a different approach for you:

var emails = nodes.reduce(function(store, node) { 
    return node.followers.reduce(function(store, follower) { 
        follower.email && (store[follower.email] = true); 
        return store; 
   }, store); 
}, {});

console.log(Object.keys(emails));

https://jsfiddle.net/epp9zwj0/6/ A bit shorter)

You got me thinking this morning, so I was looking for potential optimizations. I'm far from a guru on optimizations but I thought I'd take your idea and extend it into the followers node. forEach is notably a slow function, so I thought why not use a reducer?

https://jsperf.com/multi-reducer-comparison

Looks like a clear win, and we increase readability, separate the concerns a bit, and made each reducer a little more testable.

Cheers!

getSetOfFollowerEmails doesn't return anything. Good article. Array#reduce is underused. If I see one more var isTrue; and a for loop, I'm going to lose it.

About "one reduce to rule them all" - I recommend to have a look at Lodash chaining https://lodash.com/docs/4.17.4#lodash

#2's reducer functions needs to return acc because acc.push returns the pushed item:

const squaresOfNumbers = numArray => numbers.reduce(
    (acc, item) => {
       acc.push(item * item);
        return acc;
    },
    []
);