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

Using monads


Finally, let's take a look at an algebraic structure that helps us build and compose a sequence of computations: a monad. There are countless tutorials and articles on the web that explain monads and how they can be used. In this section, we will look at monads in our own unique and Clojure-y way.

In category theory, a monad is a morphism between functors. This means that a monad transforms the context of a contained value into another context. In pure functional programming languages, monads are data structures used to represent computations that are defined in steps. Each step is represented by an operation on a monad, and several of these steps can be chained together. Essentially, a monad is a composable abstraction of a step of any computation. A distinct feature of monads is that they allow us to model impure side effects, which may be performed in the various steps of a given computation, using pure functions.

Monads abstract the way a function binds values to arguments...