Transducers in SICP

I was re-reading the first two chapters of SICP at the weekend as I am starting to prepare SICP Distilled and I was pleased to see:

The value of expressing programs as sequence operations is that this helps us make program designs that are modular, that is, designs that are constructed by combining relatively independent pieces. We can encourage modular design by providing a library of standard components together with a conventional interface for connecting the components in flexible ways.

Modular construction is a powerful strategy for controlling complexity in engineering design. In real signal-processing applications, for example, designers regularly build systems by cascading elements selected from standardized families of filters and transducers. Similarly, sequence operations provide a library of standard program elements that we can mix and match.

While we know Rich finds his words in an etymology dictionary I thought it interesting to see someone else arrive at the same word for a similar concept.

If you have not seen Rich’s into to transducers please do so, it’s excellent.