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 9. Reactive Programming

One of the many interesting applications of programming with asynchronous tasks is reactive programming. This methodology of programming is all about asynchronously reacting to changes in state. In reactive programming, code is structured in such a way that it reacts to changes. Generally, this is implemented using asynchronous data streams, in which data and events are propagated asynchronously through a program. In fact, there are quite a few interesting variants of reactive programming.

Reactive programming is particularly useful in designing graphical user interfaces in frontend development, where changes in the internal state of an application must asynchronously trickle down to the user interface. A program is thus segregated into events and logic that is executed on those events. For programmers used to imperative and object-oriented programming techniques, the hardest part of reactive programming is thinking in reactive abstractions and letting go of...