Yesterday, I found myself helping to explain folds on the Slack. Someone was trying to understand the difference between foldr and foldl, again. This is not unexpected: Those new to functional programming need to learn how to stop thinking in imperative loops and start using higher level functions like folds.

As always, I want to illustrate how to think about the folds like so (this is math notation, not code):

foldr⊕,z ([a, b, c, d]) = (a ⊕ (b ⊕ (c ⊕ (d ⊕ z))))
foldl⊕,z ([a, b, c, d]) = ((((z ⊕ a) ⊕ b) ⊕ c) ⊕ d)

These definitions make it clear how one groups to the right, the other to the left. You can see that for many operations (like append, +, *) with the appropriate z value, these two produce the same result.¹

It’s also pretty easy for people to grasp why, when folding over a list, walking the list from the head (as system must), foldl is efficient, becoming a simple loop, and foldr is recursive, to the depth of the list.²

This is not how it is in Elm. In Elm we have:

foldr ⊕ z [a, b, c, d] = (a ⊕ (b ⊕ (c ⊕ (d ⊕ z))))
foldl ⊕ z [a, b, c, d] = (d ⊕ (c ⊕ (b ⊕ (a ⊕ z))))


Which I argue is a little harder to see what’s going on, breaks the foldr / foldl equivalence, and requires a few more steps to see why one is a plain loop and not the other.

I presume the choice was made to avoid the other difficulty in learning and using folds: The order of the arguments to the combining function.

Based on the mathematical definitions, Haskell’s functions have these type signatures:

foldr :: (a -> b -> b) -> b -> [a] -> b
foldl :: (b -> a -> b) -> b -> [a] -> b


Even I, after over a decade of Haskell coding, still have to stop and think for a second when coding if I need to flip my combining function’s args or not.³

You might think that Elm’s definitions would eliminate that mental bump because there’s only one signature to remember:

foldr : (a -> b -> b) -> b -> List a -> b
foldl : (a -> b -> b) -> b -> List a -> b


But I find it doesn’t: I still have to stop and think for a second about which way things are going, is that the direction I want, can/should I use the other fold, and is my combining function defined with the arguments in the needed order. I bet you do, too.

Which leads us to consider: Which form of foldl is better?

Many useful combining functions match a -> b -> b:

Set.insert : a -> Set a -> Set a
List.(::) : a -> List a -> List a


And common things one writes are often in this form:

\item model -> { model | filter = Dict.insert item True filter }
\(k, v) -> Dict.update k (Just << Maybe.Extra.unwrap [v] ((::) v))


These are reduction operations. In general one usually doesn’t care what order the list is traversed, and it is conventional for the reduction operations to have the form (a -> b -> b). Hence, foldl and foldr taking the same combining function is useful.

On the other hand, there are common combining operations that generally have the form a -> a -> a

Dict.union : Dict k v -> Dict k v -> Dict k v
(++) : a -> a -> a


When using these, there is an important order to the first two arguments. And so, in Elm, choosing foldr vs. foldl not only chooses the order or traversal, but also the order of arguments to the combining function.

concat listOfLists = foldr (++) [] listOfLists
oddConcat listOfLists = foldl (++) [] listOfLists

> concat[ [1, 2, 3], [4], [], [5, 6] ]
[1,2,3,4,5,6]
> oddConcat [ [1, 2, 3], [4], [], [5, 6] ]
[5,6,4,1,2,3]


For many (most?) uses, the ordering that foldr uses is natural (it is left-biased). However, it is often both conceptually, and efficiently, desirable to use foldl - It makes sense to “proceed down the list” merging the elements. Hence, foldl's swapped combining function arguments makes sense.

Given both are useful, just pick one, right? Perhaps. In Haskell, it is common to use the function flip, and it is part of the standard library, always available unqualified. It isn’t uncommon to see things like:

foldl' (flip Set.insert) Set.empty flagList


Since it is very easy to use a combining function of either form, with either fold, Haskell chooses the order it has, and it works just fine for all uses.

But Elm doesn’t have flip, and it seems small utility higher order functions are eschewed, so if foldl were defined as in Haskell, you’d have to write:

List.foldl (\s f -> Set.insert f s) Set.empty flagList


Reading that use of Set.insert requires a higher mental burden than the modest flip. You have to stop for a moment when you read that lambda. Which, I’m guessing, is what Elm’s definition of foldl is trying to avoid.

So, both?

Which leads me to this proposal. In the next major upheaval of the core libraries, define:

foldr : (a -> b -> b) -> b -> List a -> b
foldl : (b -> a -> b) -> b -> List a -> b
reduce : (a -> b -> b) -> b -> List a -> b


Where reduce is a left fold, but with the combining function in the order shown.

I know that we like having a minimal core, and that two ways to do something is not “the Elm way”… but, hear me out:

Now the library addresses two situations that programmer’s encounter:

1. Reduction operations - for these reduce is the natural choice both because of the common combining function definitions, and from efficiency point of view.
2. Merging operations - for which there are two natural choices, foldr and foldl, that match the associative meaning of these operations, and work well for merging functions.

If nothing else, even if this proposal goes nowhere, I hope you find this exploration of the order of arguments to folds enlightening.

— Mark

¹ Technically, for monoids, which are by definition associative and have a zero element that is commutative, foldr and foldl always produce the same result. I hesitate to say “monoid”, as it seems to worry people I’m getting too Haskelly… but “monoid” is what the concept is, and programmers of all types use monoids day in and day out without seeing the common pattern because we don’t name it. So - let’s not be scared of odd words: “monoid” is what it is!

² The Elm implementation of foldr will, after a depth of about 4k, decide to instead reverse the list, and then use foldl for the rest. It also has unrolled the recursion 4× so that the maximum depth it 1000. Of course, these details don’t belong in a discussion of folds for those new to functional programming.

³ The mnemonic I use, and teach, is “In foldr the z slides in from the right. With foldl it slides in from the left.”

⁴ Operations that are part of a monoid. But I’m trying hard not to say that word in the main part of the post!

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Nice analysis!

To contribute to the questions raised, I figured I’d briefly add how I’ve come to think about the folds in Elm:

Having come to Elm before having any background in haskell or in mathematical folds, I personally find it simpler to have both foldl and foldr have the same signature; in both cases, it’s one-by-one incorporating an element into the accumulator. I find a bigger mental bump when looking at haskell-style foldl since I find it easier to think about incorporating items into an accumulator in some order (where having the same signature makes sense) than to think about unrolling the fold into an equivalent mathematical expression (where I agree the different signature does make more sense).

The mnemonic I use is “foldl: fold from the left”, “foldr: fold from the right” (note that in Elm <=0.15, there was also “foldp: fold from the past” for use with Signals) – meaning with foldl the leftmost item is incorporated first; and with foldr, the rightmost is first (from which can be deduced that it must require space overhead to dig in to the bottom of the list to start iterating).

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Coming from JavaScript, I’m used to Array.prototype.reduce and Array.prototype.reduceRight having the same signature. I had no idea that Haskell had different signatures for foldl and foldr before reading this thread! At first I was shocked – it sounds so easy to mess up, or to be confused about. Now I see that there’s some mathsy stuff that can motivate it, but I don’t quite understand it yet.

To me, .reduce and foldl has always meant “go through the list from left to right and build something up along the way”. I almost always use .reduce and foldl. A couple of times, the thing I’ve built up along the way required starting from the right, so then I used .reduceRight or foldr. So personally I’ve never had a problem with Elm’s foldl and foldr, but now I’m intrigued to learn more about folds in a new light.

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Thank you both, @avh4 and @lydell for your replies.

They both illustrate that one common way of think of these operations is reduction, or as @lydell put it:

From this view, there is almost never a reason to go other than left to right (or really, from the head to tail). And as we all see, the argument order for the combining function is naturally a -> b -> b. Hence why I suggest we call this operation reduce.

It is the other user, merging that other way of defining foldl comes into play. To extend @lydell’s style of description, Merging is

lining up all the items in the list side by side and merging them together in pairs, either from the left or from the right

I can definitely see how this is annoying coming from Haskell.

I do like that the signatures of foldl and foldr are identical, in that it makes it easy to change from one to the other by changing the l or r about. Say in some complex algorithm you lose track of which way round you are doing something and get the answer backwards, usually fixed by switching over the fold direction.

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The confusion for me used to be in choosing between foldl and foldr. If they were named differently, for example fold and foldRight, I think intuition would build up more naturally.

List-operations are naturally head to tail. That would be the case for fold.

I like “reduce” from javascript, but “folding” feels really intuitive to me.

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I actually regularly forget that it’s called foldl and not just fold. The first time I saw foldr I thought it was a misspelling of folder

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