Book Image

Mastering Clojure

By : Akhil Wali
Book Image

Mastering Clojure

By: Akhil Wali

Overview of this book

Clojure is a general-purpose language from the Lisp family with an emphasis on functional programming. It has some interesting concepts and features such as immutability, gradual typing, thread-safe concurrency primitives, and macro-based metaprogramming, which makes it a great choice to create modern, performant, and scalable applications. Mastering Clojure gives you an insight into the nitty-gritty details and more advanced features of the Clojure programming language to create more scalable, maintainable, and elegant applications. You’ll start off by learning the details of sequences, concurrency primitives, and macros. Packed with a lot of examples, you’ll get a walkthrough on orchestrating concurrency and parallelism, which will help you understand Clojure reducers, and we’ll walk through composing transducers so you know about functional composition and process transformation inside out. We also explain how reducers and transducers can be used to handle data in a more performant manner. Later on, we describe how Clojure also supports other programming paradigms such as pure functional programming and logic programming. Furthermore, you’ll level up your skills by taking advantage of Clojure's powerful macro system. Parallel, asynchronous, and reactive programming techniques are also described in detail. Lastly, we’ll show you how to test and troubleshoot your code to speed up your development cycles and allow you to deploy the code faster.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Clojure
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
References
Index

Understanding transducers


Transducers are essentially a stack of transformations that can be composed and applied to any representation of data. They allow us to define transformations that are agnostic of implementation-specific details about the source of the supplied data. Transducers also have a significant performance benefit. This is attributed to the avoidance of unnecessary memory allocations for arbitrary containers, such as sequences or other collections, to store intermediate results between transformations.

Note

Transducers have been introduced in Clojure 1.7.

Transformations can be composed without the use of transducers as well. This can be done using the comp and partial forms. We can pass any number of transformations to the comp function, and the transformation returned by the comp function will be a composition of the supplied transformations in the right-to-left order. In Clojure, a transformation is conventionally denoted as xf or xform.

Note

The following examples can be...