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 6. Exploring Category Theory

On a journey into functional programming, a programmer will eventually stumble upon category theory. First off, let's just say that the study of category theory is not really needed to write better code. It's more prevalent in the internals of pure functional programming languages, such as Haskell and Idris, in which functions are pure and more like mathematical functions that do not have implicit side effects such as I/O and mutation. However, category theory helps us reason about a very fundamental and practical aspect of computation: composition. Functions in Clojure, unlike in pure functional programming languages, are quite different from mathematical functions as they can perform I/O and other side effects. Of course, they can be pure under certain circumstances, and thus concepts from category theory are still useful in Clojure for writing reusable and composable code based on pure functions.

Category theory can be thought of as a mathematical framework...