Functional Programming with Java - Reducing

In functional programming, reducing is a technique to reduce a stream of values to a single result by apply a function on all the values. Java provides reduce() function in a Stream class from Java 8 onwards. A stream has inbuilt reducing methods like sum(), average(), count() as well which works on all elements of the stream and returns the single result.

Following example shows how Reducing works.

import java.util.stream.IntStream;

public class FunctionTester {
   public static void main(String[] args) {

      //1 * 2 * 3 * 4 = 24
      int product = IntStream.range(1, 5) 
         .reduce((num1, num2) -> num1 * num2)
         .orElse(-1); 

      //1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10
      int sum =  IntStream.range(1, 5).sum();

      System.out.println(product);
      System.out.println(sum);
   } 
}

Output

24
10