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

Chapter 5. Composing Transducers

Let's get back to our journey of performing computations over data in Clojure. We've already discussed how reducers can be used to process collections in Chapter 3, Parallelization Using Reducers. Transducers are, in fact, a generalization of reducers that are independent of the source of data. Also, reducers are more about parallelization, while transducers are more focused on generalizing data transformations without restricting us to any particular source of data. Transducers capture the essence of the standard functions that operate on sequences, such as map and filter, for several sources of data. They allow us to define and compose transformations of data regardless of how the data is supplied to us.

Incidentally, in the context of physics, a transducer is a device that converts a signal from one form of energy into another form. In a way, Clojure transducers can be thought of as ways to capture the energy in functions, such as map and filter, and convert...