The Clojure Workshop

By Joseph Fahey , Thomas Haratyk , Scott McCaughie and 2 more
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    2. Data Types and Immutability
About 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.
Publication date:
January 2020
Publisher
Packt
Pages
800
ISBN
9781838825485

 

2. Data Types and Immutability

Overview

In this chapter, we start by discovering the concept of immutability and its relevance in modern programs. We then examine simple data types such as strings, numbers and booleans, highlighting subtle differences in different environments like Clojure and ClojureScript. After a first exercise, we move on to more elaborated data types with collections such as lists, vectors, maps and sets, learning along the way which to use in different situations. After touching on the collection and sequence abstractions, we learn new techniques for working with nested data structures, before finally moving on to the final activity: implementing our very own in-memory database.

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to work with the commonly used data types in Clojure.

 

Introduction

Computer hardware has evolved dramatically in the last few decades. On a typical computer, storage and memory capacity have both increased a millionfold compared to the early 1980s. Nonetheless, standard industry practices in software development and mainstream ways of programming are not that different. Programming languages such as C++, Java, Python, and Ruby still typically encourage you to change things in place, and to use variables and mutate the state of a program, that is, to do things as if we were programming on a computer with a minimal amount of memory. However, in our quest for efficiency, better languages, and better tools, we reach for higher-level languages. We want to get further away from machine code. We want to write less code and let the computers do the tedious work.

We don't want to think about the computer's memory anymore, such as where a piece of information is stored and whether it's safe and shareable, as much as...

 

Simple Data Types

A data type designates what kind of value a piece of data holds; it is a fundamental way of classifying data. Different types allow different kinds of operations: we can concatenate strings, multiply numbers, and perform logic algebra operations with Booleans. Because Clojure has a strong emphasis on practicality, we don't explicitly assign types to values in Clojure, but those values still have a type.

Clojure is a hosted language and has three notable, major implementations in Java, JavaScript, and .NET. Being a hosted language is a useful trait that allows Clojure programs to run in different environments and take advantage of the ecosystem of its host. Regarding data types, it means that each implementation has different underlying data types, but don't worry as those are just implementation details. As a Clojure programmer, it does not make much difference, and if you know how to do something in Clojure, you likely know how to do it in, say, ClojureScript...

 

Collections

Clojure is a functional programming language in which we focus on building the computations of our programs in terms of the evaluation of functions, rather than building custom data types and their associated behaviors. In the other dominant programming paradigm, object-oriented programming, programmers define the data types and the operations available on them. Objects are supposed to encapsulate data and communicate with each other by passing messages around. But there is an unfortunate tendency to create classes and new types of objects to customize the shape of the data, instead of using more generic data structures, which cascades into creating specific methods to access and modify the data. We have to come up with decent names, which is difficult, and then we pass instances of objects around in our programs. We create new classes all the time, but more code means more bugs. It is a recipe for disaster; it is an explosion of code, with code that is very specific...

 

Summary

In this chapter, we discovered the concept of immutability. We learned about Clojure's simple data types, as well as their implementation on different host platforms. We discovered the most common types of collections and sequences: maps, sets, vectors, and lists. We saw how to use them with generic collections and sequence operations. We learned how to read and update complex structures of nested collections. We also learned about the standard functions for using collection data structures, as well as more advanced usage with deeply nested data structures. In the next chapter, we will learn advanced techniques for working with functions.

About the Authors
  • Joseph Fahey

    Joseph Fahey has been a developer for nearly two decades. He got his start in the Digital Humanities in the early 2000s. Ever since then, he has been trying to hone his skills and expand his inventory of techniques. This lead him to Common Lisp and then to Clojure when it was first introduced. As an independent developer, Joseph was able to quickly start using Clojure professionally. These days, Joseph gets to write Clojure for his day job at Empear AB.

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  • Thomas Haratyk

    Thomas Haratyk graduated from Lille University of Science and Technology and has been a professional programmer for nine years. After studying computer science and starting his career in France, he is now working as a consultant in London, helping start-ups develop their products and scale their platforms with Clojure, Ruby, and modern JavaScript.

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  • Scott McCaughie

    Scott McCaughie lives near Glasgow, Scotland where he works as a senior Clojure developer for Previse, a Fintech startup aiming to solve the problem of slow payments in the B2B space. Having graduated from Heriot-Watt University, his first 6 years were spent building out Risk and PnL systems for JP Morgan. A fortuitous offer of a role learning and writing Clojure came up and he jumped at the chance. 5 years of coding later and it's the best career decision he's made. In his spare time, Scott is an avid reader, enjoys behavioral psychology and financial independence podcasts, and keeps fit by commuting by bike, running, climbing, hill walking, snowboarding. You get the picture!

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  • Yehonathan Sharvit

    Yehonathan Sharvit has been a software developer since 2001. He discovered functional programming in 2009. It has profoundly changed his view of programming and his coding style. He loves to share his discoveries and his expertise. He has been giving courses on Clojure and JavaScript since 2016. He holds a master's degree in Mathematics.

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  • Konrad Szydlo

    Konrad Szydlo is a psychology and computing graduate from Bournemouth University. He has worked with Clojure for the last 8 years. Since January 2016, he has worked as a software engineer and team leader at Retailic, responsible for building a website for the biggest royalty program in Poland. Prior to this, he worked as a developer with Sky, developing e-commerce and sports applications, where he used Ruby, Java, and PHP. He is also listed in the Top 75 Datomic developers on GitHub.

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