Web Development with Clojure

Threading Expressions

As you might suspect by now, expressions can become difficult to read if they’re deeply nested. Luckily for us, Clojure provides a couple of helper forms to address this problem. Let’s say we have a range of ten numbers, and we want to increment each number, interpose the number 5 between them, then sum the result. We could write the following:

It’s a little difficult to tell what’s happening in that expression at first glance. If each step were even a little more complex, we’d be really lost. On top of that, if we wanted to rearrange any of the steps, such as interposing 5 before incrementing, then we’d have to renest all our expressions.

An alternative way ...