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Comment by jackconsidine | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know if `keyBy` will also be supported? I suppose it'd be pretty trivial to take a `groupBy` and make it `keyBy`, but then again it's pretty trivial to implement `groupBy` from scratch.

I no longer install lodash that often anymore

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I'm a big fan of the design of Elixir's Enum.group_by, which has one-parameter and two-parameter forms. The one-parameter form is like any other language's groupBy — but the two-parameter form takes two mapping closures; passes each element into both of them; and uses the output of the first closure as the grouping key, and the output of the second closure as the value to be registered under that grouping key.

This flexible primitive enables you to do basically any grouping transform you want (incl. the Lodash-style keyBy) in a single short line of code.

It's a lot like a sortBy operation, in that to emulate it, you would have to do a map to extract the key, producing pairs; sort (or in this case group) the pairs; and then deep-transform the pairs inside the data structure by unwrapping the keys off them. In other words, it's something that's a bit too high-friction to reach for if the language doesn't just give it to you (you'd probably do what you're planning to do some other way); but if the language does give it to you, you'll use it quite often.

No current plans for `keyBy`, and I don't know that it's really that well-motivated. (I am on TC39.)

You can do that by nesting

  Array.prototype.map

in the parameter for

  Object.fromEntries

in an easy way (probably not as optimized as a built-in, but that might be irrelevant for most cases, since its just a duplicated iteration, not quadratic)

For reference, keyBy returns an object with the same keys as groupBy, but the value of a key is the last element to produce that key, instead of an array of all of the elements that did.

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