April 2012
Intermediate to advanced
628 pages
18h 42m
English
Content preview from Clojure ProgrammingBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 2. Functional Programming
Functional programming (FP) is one of those amorphous concepts in software development that means different things to different people. Despite the many shades of gray that exist in the FP spectrum, it’s easy to assert that Clojure is a functional programming language, and that that character is the root of many of its most attractive facilities and advantages.
In this chapter, we will:
Give you a reasonable introduction to what functional programming is
Explain why you should care about it
Discuss the details of Clojure’s implementation that make it a desirable functional programming language
Along the way, we hope to make the case that FP—and Clojure’s flavor of FP in particular—far from being an academic exercise, can improve your practice of software design and development just as structural- and object-oriented programming concepts have over the years.
If you’re already familiar with functional programming (whether via Ruby, or JavaScript, or even more opinionated functional languages like Scala, F#, or Haskell, et al.), much of what follows will appear to be old hat, but it’s worth internalizing so that you can understand Clojure’s cut at FP.
If you are completely new to FP or initially skeptical of it, we’d urge you in particular to hang on for the ride, it’ll be worth your time and effort.[35] Recall again from Chapter 1 the adage Clojure demands that you raise your game, and pays you back for doing so; just as you may have had to grow to learn ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.