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 the reader


The reader is responsible for interpreting Clojure code. It performs several steps to translate source code in textual representation into executable machine code. In this section, we will briefly describe these steps performed by the reader to illustrate how the reader works.

Clojure and other languages from the Lisp family are homoiconic. In a homoiconic language, the source code of a program is represented as a plain data structure. This means that all the code written in a Lisp language is simply a bunch of nested lists. Thus, we can manipulate programs' code just like any other list of values. Clojure has a few more data structures, such as vectors and maps in its syntax, but they can be handled just as easily. In languages that are not homoiconic, any expression or statement in a program has to be translated into an internal data structure termed as a parse tree, or syntax tree, when the program is compiled or interpreted. In Lisps, however, an expression is...