Programming Clojure, 2nd Edition

Wrapping Up

This has been a long chapter. But think about how much ground you have covered: you can instantiate basic literal types, define and call functions, manage namespaces, and read and write metadata. You can write purely functional code, and yet you can easily introduce side effects when you need to do so. You have also met Lisp concepts including reader macros, special forms, and destructuring.

The material here would take hundreds of pages to cover in most other languages. Is the Clojure way really that much simpler? Yes, in part. Half the credit for this chapter belongs to Clojure. Clojure’s elegant design and abstraction choices make the language much easier to learn than most.

That said, the language may not seem so easy to ...