To fully appreciate Clojure, we hearken back to Paul Graham’s essay “Beating the Averages,” an interesting look at the inner workings of his company Viaweb during the years prior to being bought by Yahoo! Inc. in 1998. Though interesting as survey of startup culture, the truly memorable part of the essay was the description of how Viaweb used the programming language Lisp as an advantage over its competition. How could a programming language more than 50 years old provide any market advantage over Viaweb’s competitors, who were surely using modern enterprise technologies? Without repeating the exact terms of the essay, Graham makes a compelling case for the capability of Lisp to facilitate a more agile programming environment.
Clojure is a dialect of Lisp directly supporting concurrent software development using functional programming techniques, and like the Lisp described in “Beating the Averages,” provides an environment conducive to agility. Clojure fosters agility in ways that many popular programming languages can’t. Many programming languages are bewitched with most or all of the following:
In contrast, Clojure provides a mixture of power and practicality fostering rapid development cycles. But the benefits of Clojure don’t stop with its agile nature—as the clarion call declares, “Multicore is the new hot topic” (Mache Creeger in ACM Queue, vol. 3, no. 7).
Though the idea of multicore processors isn’t in itself new, its importance is becoming increasingly focused. Until recently, you could avoid concurrent and parallel programming techniques and instead ride the ever-quickening processor wave to better performance. Well, that ride is slowing to a stop, and Clojure is here to help.
Clojure provides a unique mix of functional programming and host symbiosis—an embrace of and direct support for its host platform, in this case the Java Virtual Machine. Additionally, the simplification and often elimination of the complexities involved in coordinated state change have positioned Clojure as an important language moving forward. All software developers must eventually address these problems as a matter of course, and the study, understanding, and eventual utilization of Clojure is an essential path toward conquering them. From topics such as software transactional memory to laziness to immutability, this book will guide you on your way to understanding the “why” of Clojure, in addition to the “how.”
We’ll be your guides into a thoughtful understanding of the joyfulness in Clojure, for we believe its art is prelude to a new age of software development.
