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

Clojure's Most Procedural Loop: doseq

Before we get started with recursion, let's take a look at the doseq macro. It is arguably the most procedural of Clojure's looping alternatives. At least, it looks a lot like the foreach loop found in other languages. Here's a very simple use of doseq:

user> (doseq [n (range 5)]
    (println (str "Line " n)))
Line 0
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4
nil

Translated into English, we might say: "For each integer from 0 to 5, print out a string with the word 'Line' and the integer." You might ask: "What is that nil doing there?" Good question. doseq always returns nil. In other words, doseq doesn't collect anything. The sole purpose of doseq is to perform side effects, such as printing to the REPL, which is what println does here. The strings that appear in your REPL—Line 0, Line 1, and so on—are not returned values; they are side effects.

Note...