Home

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks - Clojure

This blog post is a next article from series related with books "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" and its sequel. Each post will describe a single language chosen by this book and its most interesting and influencing features, from my point of view and previous experiences. I hope that you will find this series interesting. Do not hesitate with sharing your feedback and comments below!

Introduction

We are heading to the end of the first book. We are almost there - only two positions left and today I would like to focus on another language which is based on the JVM.

In the book Bruce Tate assigns for each language a movie character (e.g. one of my favorite is Agent Smith associated with Erlang). Also choice for Clojure, which is referred here, is brilliant - Master Yoda speaks differently (like any Lisp-family based language), he is an exile (those languages waited very long for its fame and glory) and he has an extraordinary knowledge.

What is different in Clojure?

For me the key thing is that Clojure is a pragmatic language, and it is created by pragmatists.

Main example - it favors pure functions (with no side-effects), but also does not close you inside very strict environment, where you cannot work with side-effects anymore. Instead it provides very natural and effective primitives for managing them.

Concurrency primitives based on STM (Software Transactional Memory) - like references and atoms, agents, or amazing standard library for manging asynchronicity - core.async are another elements.

Clojure as an langauge has unique approach to state manipulation, which is natural and not broken as other models. Its epochal time model is a definition of states succession over time. Modified state is a value, which means it is immutable. But identity, which is the aforementioned succession of states, is a narrow view. Value inside that view differs depending on the time that observers choose to reveal it.

The one of the main benefits for me, is also that Clojure runs not only on top of JVM. Even if the CLR port is not actively used, ClojureScript are becoming a huge thing. It really evolves, pushing many things forward (like next version of Om or other various React.js wrappers like Reagent). It also evolves in surprising directions - e.g. ability to create mobile applications in Clojure, in a similar fashion to the React Native (more about that here and here).

Also there is one more point regarding the runtime platform - JVM and its evolution can be a limiting factor (you can observe that with e.g. lack of tail-call optimization for recurrency, which is a key thing in functional programming language). Using it as a platform has advantages and disadvantages - in the other words - it is a double-edged sword. Thanks to its popularity, it brings many things to the table (community, experience, stable runtime and huge collection of libraries) - but taking care about compatibility with this ecosystem is expensive and also evolution is slowed down by a velocity and sometimes direction of the runtime evolution. Keep in mind that it has totally different momentum - whole problem is very nicely explained by Brian Goetz here.

Clojure is focused on data structures and its manipulation. It is our primary task in our daily job, every day we sort, transform, filter and shuffle data structures. Well defined and designed sequences (with support for lazy collections) and other more advanced constructs like reducers and transducers - everything helps you with one of the most common daily tasks. Internally, implementation is also amazing - thanks to immutability we can leverage fully structural sharing for small and large data structures. Even if you decide to share your data with the external world, you can do it easily in a Clojure style with edn.

Clojure derives many things from Lisp-family languages - macros are also one of those. Language creators gave you such amazing power, but also a responsiblity, to adapt and adjust language constructs. You can benefit from the language homoiconicity, create your own DSLs and so on. What is interesting, Clojure deliberately removed ability to define your own reader macros, in order to avoid creating your own and potentially incompatible Lisp dialects.

It is hard not to mention creator of the language - Rich Hickey. He is brilliant designer and insightful speaker. You are obliged to watch at least Simple made Easy talk (personally my favorite, an eye-opener for me was Clojure/Conj 2012 talk about Language of the System).

We have other choices on the JVM…

Yes and I do not want to say that they are worse than Clojure. They are different and most of them (Groovy, Kotlin, Java) they are not adding anything new or revolutionary. Also, I have got a feeling that Scala, which was (still is?) a promising language, floats in a very unstable and dangerous direction - forks, difficult stewardship and adding too many features to the language, often in a very chaotic way (I wrote about that here) - everything adds up, I hope that it will not collapse underneath its own weight. Please, do not get me wrong - Scala is not a bad language, only some decisions made related with its future and development direction are slightly disturbing.

What is next?

And we arrived almost to the end of the book. The last but not least is Haskell - strict and purist like Spock from Star Trek (yes, that is the Bruce’s choice). Then, after a short break, we will start again with first language described in the sequel Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks.

See you in the next posts! :wink: And please, do not hesitate with sharing your feedback and comments below.

Credits

Home