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 5. Macros
Historically, Lisps have been described as “programmable programming languages.” This description fits Clojure, and a large part of the reason for that is macros. Macros allow a programmer to extend the Clojure language in ways that are difficult or impossible in most other languages.
A programming language is a means for building abstractions. Instead of doing tedious manual work, a programmer can write code once and treat that code as a reusable unit. Code can be executed repeatedly in a loop; or, code can be grouped as a unit and given a name as a function; or, using conditionals, the same code can do different things in different circumstances.
It should be clear that some languages offer more powerful means of abstraction than others. Imagine for a moment a programming language without loops. Such a language might be usable, but unrolling all loops by hand would be incredibly tedious. Similarly, a language without functions might be able to do anything any other Turing-complete language can do, but code would have to be repeated over and over.
In short, when a language lacks proper means of abstraction, the result is boilerplate and repetition, both signs of fundamental weaknesses in that language. Macros are powerful because they give you a way to define entirely new levels of abstraction within the language itself. Macros are the ultimate tool for eliminating boilerplate and growing a programming language up to meet your needs.
What Is a Macro?
Macros allow you ...
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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.