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

Using a componentized architecture


Now that we've laid out the preceding steps, we'll put the functionalities into a more cohesive package. A queue of data is runtime state that has to be managed. Recall the component architecture that's widely used in the Clojure community. This architecture is the result of an academic paper called Out Of The Tarpit in which the authors have argued that complexity is the biggest nemesis to working software (you can read more at http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf). Any incidental complexity should be avoided or removed, and things, such as runtime state, should be cordoned off to a small managed component of the program. This is important because it reflects a componentized architecture that many banks use. It allows for an incremental approach to building out and architecting core banking systems. Many industry participants adopt what's known as a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as part of a suite of best practices. There's a core banking platform...