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

Initializing reduce

Tasks such as adding integers or finding maximum values have a common thread: the input values and the accumulated values are of the same type. When two numbers are added, the result is a number; when a maximum or a minimum is chosen between two numbers, the result is still a number. When we use reduce to add numbers together, the running total is a number just like all the other inputs. In the examples so far, the first function call that reduce makes takes the first two items in the sequence. We can break a reduce call into its successive function calls:

(reduce + [1 2 3 5 7])
(+ 1 2)
(+ 3 3)
(+ 6 5)
(+ 11 7)

We actually don't need the anonymous function that we used in the previous examples, because + takes numbers as arguments, and returns a number:

Figure 5.3: The arguments and the return value are all of the same type

In each of our examples so far, three different things are all of the same type:

  • The values in the...