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

Solving Complex Problems with Recursion

When we talk about recursion, there are really two categories of use cases that are quite different from each other. This is particularly true of Clojure. On the one hand, recursion is the primary, low-level way to build loops where other languages would use for, foreach, or with. On the other hand, functional languages such as Clojure generally make it easier for programmers to find elegant, recursive solutions to complex problems.

Tail recursion and functions, or loops, built around recur are suited for problems where the data, input, and output, is essentially linear. Because tail recursive functions can only return one call at a time, they cannot handle problems where it is necessary to follow multiple, forking paths through the data. Clojure provides the tools you need. Using them may require some practice in approaching the problem in a recursive style.

To help build this skill, the remaining exercises in this chapter will be dedicated...