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

Thinking in Clojure


Let's briefly discuss a handful of good practices for building real world applications in Clojure. Of course, these practices are only guidelines, and you should eventually try to establish your own set of rules and practices for writing code in Clojure:

  • Minimize state and use pure functions: Most applications must inevitably use some form of state. You must always strive to reduce the amount of state you're dealing with, and implement most of the heavy lifting in pure functions. State can be managed using reference types, channels, or even monads in Clojure, thus giving us a lot of proven options. In this way, we can reduce the number of conditions that can cause any unexpected behavior in a program. Pure functions are also easier to compose and test.

  • Don't forget about laziness: Laziness can be used as an alternative to solve problems that have solutions based on recursion. Although laziness does tend to simplify several aspects of functional programming, it also incurs...