Book Image

Clojure for Finance

By : Timothy Washington
Book Image

Clojure for Finance

By: Timothy Washington

Overview of this book

<p>Clojure is a dynamic programming language with an emphasis on functional programming. Clojure is well suited to financial modeling as it is a functional programming language. Such languages help developers work with high-level mathematical abstractions without having to implement low-level code that handles the arithmetic operations.</p> <p>Starting with the importance of representing data and calculations effectively, this book will take you all the way to being competent in financial analytics and building financial applications.</p> <p>First, we introduce the notions of computation and finance, which will help you understand Clojure's utility to solve real-world problems in many domains, especially finance. Next, we will show you how to develop the simple-moving-average function by using the more advanced partition Clojure data transformation function. This function, along with others, will be used to calculate and manipulate data.</p> <p>You will then learn to implement slightly more complicated equations, how to traverse data, and deal with branching and conditional dispatch. Then, the concept of side-effecting and its various approaches are introduced, along with the strategy of how to use data as the interface to other systems. Finally, you will discover how to build algorithms while manipulating and composing functions.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Clojure for Finance
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Concurrency and parallelism


Though slightly beyond the scope of this book, there may come a time when you will want to run simultaneous paths of execution. If this happens, it's good to know the options that Clojure provides for running concurrent or parallel code. We should, of course, understand the difference between the two.

Concurrency occurs when many threads of execution are running independent of each other. This can technically happen on a single-core chip where a processor multitasks between performing work in each thread. Concurrency makes resource-intensive software more usable by allowing many things to happen at once. Parallelism is made possible by computer processors with multiple cores. It occurs when multiple tasks physically take place at the same time in a multicore chip. Performance is greatly improved by running many threads of execution at the same time. Clojure provides several ways of tackling concurrent execution based on the needs and constraints of a given situation...