How to simulate let expressions in JavaScript?

Answer 1

Instead of using an IIFE just use a normal function with a proper name to make things more explicit:

const _let = f =>
  f();

const collateBy = f => xs =>
  xs.reduce((m, x) =>
    _let((r = f(x), ys = m.get(r) || []) =>
      m.set(r, (ys.push(x), ys))), new Map());

const includes = t => s =>
  s.includes(t);

xs = ["Dev", "Jeff", "Kalib", "Amy", "Gemma"];

const collation = collateBy(includes("e")) (xs);

console.log(collation.get(true));
console.log(collation.get(false));

Answer 2

In Lisp, a let expression is just syntactic sugar for a left-left lambda (i.e. an immediately-invoked function expression). For example, consider:

(let ([x 1]
      [y 2])
  (+ x y))

; This is syntactic sugar for:

((lambda (x y)
    (+ x y))
  1 2)

In ES6, we can use arrow functions and default parameters to create an IIFE that looks like a let expression as follows:

const z = ((x = 1, y = 2) => x + y)();

console.log(z);

Using this hack, we can define take as follows:

const take = (n, xxs) =>
    n === 0 || xxs.length === 0 ?
    [] : (([x, ...xs] = xxs) => [x, ...take(n - 1, xs)])();

console.log(take(7, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5])); // [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
console.log(take(3, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5])); // [1, 2, 3]
console.log(take(1, [undefined, 1]));  // [undefined]

Hope that helps.