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Genuine question: what is the point of this?

it seems like a long-winded and not very clear way to write something you could just do with a function and a list comprehension

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Well, in Clojure they solve the problem that the standard functions are inefficient when you chain a bunch of list manipulations together (because they all return lazy lists) and neatly sidestep the fact that Clojure doesn't have generators.

So if Clojure had some form of fusion of composed functions on lists, that would equate out to what transducers are doing?

That's almost literally what happens. (comp (map inc) (filter even?)) when applied takes all even numbers from a collection/channel/what-have-you and adds one to them. Filter and map normally take a collection as their last argument, but when none are supplied, a transducer is returned instead.

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