I could use a bit of help thinking through the approach. I'm in JS and I need to transform a string like "(((a,1),(b,2),(c,3)))` into an array. I was able to figure out an algorithm but I feel it would benefit from being more functional and separated into smaller, more meaningful pieces. However, I'm not sure how to start refactoring it. Where would you start?

const R = require("ramda");

function deserializeDFS (input) {
  let results = [];
  let seq = "";
  let rem = input;

  if (!input) {
    return {
      results,
      rem,
    };
  }

  for (let i = 0; i < input.length; i += 1) {
    let char = R.head(rem);

    rem = R.tail(rem);

    if (char === "(") {
      let res = deserializeDFS(rem);

      rem = res.rem;
      results.push(res.results);
    }
    else if (char === ")") {
      if (seq) results.push(seq);
      break;
    }
    else if (char === ",") {
      if (seq) results.push(seq);
      seq = "";
    }
    else {
      seq += char;
    }
  }

  return {
    results,
    rem,
  };
}

console.log(deserializeDFS("(((a,1),(b,2),(c,3)))"));

@denik I really enjoyed your "Embodied Runtime" talk at Conj, thanks! It was especially cool to see the sped-up videos of the human implementations of pure functions. Just in case you're not already aware of it, I wanted to point out Bret Victor's amazing work on programming environments where you can directly, visually observe the dynamic runtime behavior of your program (posting this here rather than PM because I try to make sure everyone's aware of Victor's work): PS - for anyone who hasn't seen Dennis's talk, it's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GAdjZQAp4E http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming