Clojure Applied

Make Reasoned Choices

Clojure was developed using reasoned choices. Every decision that went into its features had trade-offs that were carefully weighed after time was taken to fully understand the consequences.

For example, compare Clojure’s state-management facilities to the message-based protocol you find in Erlang. Clojure focuses on concurrent processes implemented on one host, whereas Erlang focuses on distributed systems. Clojure’s atoms, refs, agents, and core.async library are a more efficient fit for that concurrency model than message-passing. This decision yields simple, robust concurrency at the cost of nearly transparent distributability. Horizontal scaling is more difficult, vertical scaling more effective.

Adopting this approach ...