Clojure

Functional programming languages have become a bit of a hype.

But the ideas are not really so new.
The first languages beyond Assembly language that have maintained some relevance up to today were FORTRAN, COBOL and Lisp. Indirectly also Algol, because it inspired pretty much any modern mainstream programming language in some way through some intermediate ancestors. The early Algol Variants itself have disappeared .

It can be argued if the early Lisp Dialects were really functional languages, but they did support some functional patterns and made them popular at least in certain communities. I would say that popular scripting languages like the Ruby programming language, the Perl programming language, the Lua programming language and especially JavaScript brought them to the main stream.

Lisp has always remained in its niche. But the question arose on creating a new Lisp that follows more strictly the functional paradigm and is somewhat more modern, cleaner and simpler than the traditional Lisps. It was done and it is called Clojure.

So anybody who has never used any Lisp will at first be lost, because it is a jungle of parentheses „((((())))()()()(…)“ with some minor stuff in between…
Actually that is an issue, when we move from today’s common languages to Clojure. But it is not that bad. The infix-notation is familiar to us, but it has its benefits to use one simple syntax for almost everything.

An expression that consists of a function call is written like this (function-name param1 param2 parm3...). +, -, *,…. are just functions like anything else, so if we want to write we just write .

In the early days of calculators it was easier to build something that works with a notion called „RPN“, so there we would write 3 ENTER 4 * 5 ENTER 6 * +, which is similar to the Lisp way, but just the other way round.

It is easy to add a different number of values:
* (+) -> 0
* (+ 7) -> 7
* (+ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7) -> 28

In Clojure functions are just normal values like numbers, arrays, lists,… that can be passed around.. It is good programming practice to rely on this where it helps. And with more experience it will be helpful more often.

Immutability is king. Most of the default structures of Clojure are immutable. They can be passed around without the fear that they might change once they have been constructed. This helps for multithreading.

Clojure provides lists, arrays, sets, hashmaps, and the sorted variants of the latter. These can be written easily:
* List: (list 1 2 3) -> (1 2 3) (entries are evaluated in this case)
* List: '(1 2 3) -> (1 2 3) (entries are not evaluated in this case)
* Array: [1 2 3] (entries are evaluated in this case)
* Set: #{1 2 3} (entries are evaluated in this case)
* Map: {1 2, 3 4} (entries are evaluated in this case. key-value-Pairs are usually grouped with a comma, which is whitespace for Clojure)

All of these are immutable. So methods that change collections, always create a copy that contains the changes. The copy can be done lazily or share data with the original.

Actually I can teach Clojure in course of two to five days duration depending on the experience of the participants and the goals they want to achieve.

There is much more to write about Clojure…