Clojure
I’ve been studying the new language called Clojure (all the cool kids are talking about Clojure). It is a functional language created by Rich Hickey around 2007. This is a(nother) dialect of Lisp. It is a dynamic language as Ruby, JavaScript and others. As said before Clojure (pronounced as closure) it’s a impure functional language in contrast with Haskell, a pure functional language. It runs over the JVM, so it’s fast, interoperable with Java among a lots of good stuffs that JVM give us. To put hands-on and try code something you can use the try Clojure online or you can download the clojure.jar file and run it. Surprisingly Clojure it’s easy to learn.
java -jar clojure-x.x.x.jar
What it a functional language? (concepts)
first-order functions -> functions are treated as values. You can store a function on a variable, you can pass one function to another or you can return a function from another function.
var sum = function(a,b){
return a + b;
};
var obj = function(sum){
return {
hello: "hello",
sum: sum
};
}();
obj.sum(3,5);
functions constructs -> the language constructs are function instead of keyword. Constructions for conditions (if), for iterations (for, while), catch exceptions (try, catch) and others.
(if condition do-it else-do-it)
stateless -> it’s functional in the sense of math, you have functions which defines values input and output and doesn’t rely on outside global state. In such pure function you won’t produce any side-effect (read, write outside resource). Obviously we will produce programs which causes side-effects, clojure helps you build “mutable” data . On other pure languages like Haskell side-effects are treated as expections so you have concepts like actors and monad.
immutable data -> collections and local variable, in clojure, are immutable. The immutability, helps us in parallelism, since the “values” are immutable you can shared then without worry about locks.
currying -> is the technique of transforming a function that takes multiple arguments (or an n-tuple of arguments) in such a way that it can be called as a chain of functions each with a single argument (partial application).
memoization -> is an optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by having function calls avoid repeating the calculation of results for previously processed inputs.
Leandro Moreira 