Plumb: A Mini Language for Mini Functions

Plumb is a Domain Specific Language for defining small, incidental, throwaway functions. In other words, the ‘plumbing’ to join the component parts of a program.

Not very useful on its own, Plumb is designed to be embedded into more capable ‘host’ languages. Implementations are simple to create.

Plumb is actually a special syntax for Lambda Calculus. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry ;)

When To Use Plumb?

When verbosity puts you off using anonymous functions
When you lack an appropriate argument for map/reduce/filter, and fall back to a loop
When your codebase doesn’t quite fit a library’s API
When you need a little laziness
When your codebase spans multiple languages
When it’s obvious what you’re doing, but the code is tedious
When some simple argument shuffling is lost in a sea of keywords

When To Avoid Plumb?

When you’re writing important business logic - better to keep the explicit detail
When you’re writing a non-obvious algorithm - don’t make it harder to follow
When your Plumb spans more than a couple of lines - you probably want to refactor into smaller parts

Getting Started

Loading/importing/including Plumb in your language of choice will give you access to the plumb function. This is the interpreter, which turns Plumb definitions into real functions of your language.

Check out the usage guide to see how Plumb definitions work.

There’s an online Plumb interpreter and I’ve also written a blog post explaining Plumb and its implementation.