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

Namespaces

Namespaces are a way to organize Clojure functions; you can think of a namespace as being a directory (or file) that stores a particular group of functions. Each directory is independent of other directories; this helps to keep different groups of functions separate and gives a clear structure to your code. It also helps to avoid the confusion that can come with naming clashes.

Consider a situation where you have written a function called calculate-total, and as part of your project, you're using a library (more on libraries later in this chapter) that also contains a function called calculate-total. Although these functions have the same name, they work differently, produce slightly different outputs, and are intended to be used in different situations. When you come to use calculate-total in your code, how does the system know which calculate-function you actually want? That's where namespaces come in. The two functions will exist in different namespaces,...