Clojure for the Brave and True

13Creating and Extending Abstractions with Multimethods, Protocols, and Records

Take a minute to contemplate how great it is to be one of Mother Nature’s top-of-the-line products: a human. As a human, you get to gossip on social media, play Dungeons and Dragons, and wear hats. Perhaps more important, you get to think and communicate in terms of abstractions.

The ability to think in terms of abstractions is truly one of the best human features. It lets you circumvent your cognitive limits by tying together disparate details into a neat conceptual package that you can hold in your working memory. Instead of having to think the clunky thought “squeezable ...