Discovering basic scoping functions – let, also, apply

In this recipe, we are going to explore three useful extension functions from the standard library—let, also, and apply. They work great together with lambda expressions and help to write clean and safe code. We are going to practice their usage while applying them to implement a sequence of data-processing operations.

Getting ready

Let's assume we can fetch the date using the following function:

fun getPlayers(): List<Player>? 

 

 

Here, the Player class is defined like this:

data class Player(val name: String, val bestScore: Int)

We would like to perform the following sequence of operations to the getPlayers() function result:

1. Print the original set of players in the list to the console
2. Sort the collection of the Player objects in descending order
3. Transform collection Player objects into the list of strings obtained from the Player.name property
4. Limit the collection to the first element and print it to the console

In order to accomplish the...