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

Demystifying category theory


Category theory has its own share of quirky notations and conventions. Let's start off by exploring some of the terminology used in category theory, in a language understandable by us mortal programmers.

A category is formally defined as a collection of objects and morphisms. In simple terms, objects represent abstract types, and morphisms represent functions that convert between these types. A category is thus analogous to a programming language that has a few types and functions, and has two basic properties:

  • There exists an identity morphism for each object in the category. In practice, a single identity function can be used to represent the identity morphism for all given objects, but this is not mandatory.

  • Morphisms in a category can be composed together into a new morphism. In fact, a composition of two or more morphisms is an optimization of applying the individual morphisms one at a time. In this way, the composition of several morphisms is said to commute...