Book Image

The Clojure Workshop

By : Joseph Fahey, Thomas Haratyk, Scott McCaughie, Yehonathan Sharvit, Konrad Szydlo
Book Image

The Clojure Workshop

By: Joseph Fahey, Thomas Haratyk, Scott McCaughie, Yehonathan Sharvit, Konrad Szydlo

Overview of this book

The Clojure Workshop is a step-by-step guide to Clojure and ClojureScript, designed to quickly get you up and running as a confident, knowledgeable developer. Because of the functional nature of the language, Clojure programming is quite different to what many developers will have experienced. As hosted languages, Clojure and ClojureScript can also be daunting for newcomers because of complexities in the tooling and the challenge of interacting with the host platforms. To help you overcome these barriers, this book adopts a practical approach. Every chapter is centered around building something. As you progress through the book, you will progressively develop the 'muscle memory' that will make you a productive Clojure programmer, and help you see the world through the concepts of functional programming. You will also gain familiarity with common idioms and patterns, as well as exposure to some of the most widely used libraries. Unlike many Clojure books, this Workshop will include significant coverage of both Clojure and ClojureScript. This makes it useful no matter your goal or preferred platform, and provides a fresh perspective on the hosted nature of the language. By the end of this book, you'll have the knowledge, skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Clojure and ClojureScript.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
2
2. Data Types and Immutability

Introduction

Macros have been a distinctive feature of Lisps for decades. They are sometimes presented as a superpower native to the world of Lisp. While macros do exist in other languages, for many decades, Lisps have had the most complete macro systems. Why is this? Languages from the Lisp family share the ability to write code that modifies itself. People often talk about "code as data": Lisp programs, with their nested sets of parentheses called s-expressions, are in fact lists. And Lisps, as languages, are good at manipulating lists. The name "Lisp" originally came from "LISt Processor" when the language was first invented in 1958. As a result, Lisps can be made to operate on the code of Lisp programs. Usually, this means that a program modifies its own code.

Note

The term homoiconicity is often applied to Lisps. While the exact meaning of this term depends on who is talking, it generally means that Lisps are written in forms that they can manipulate...