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

Coordination

Futures work well for cases like the crowdspell example. Work is assigned to a thread; the thread performs its task independently and returns a result to the initial thread. The coordination is in the gathering of the results: evaluation is blocked until all the futures have completed. Thanks to immutability, there is a guarantee that simultaneous threads won't interfere with each other because nothing is shared.

This simple model is effective precisely because it is simple. Sometimes, however, more coordination is necessary, especially when communication between threads is required.

With a future, we fork, perform a computation, and return the data:

Figure 12.6: With a future, coordination occurs when the future is dereferenced

Message sending is one way to communicate among threads. Now, we imagine three threads that send messages to one another:

Figure 12.7: Complex interactions between multiple threads

To...