Introduction to Functional Programming with Clojure

Functional programming has many advantages. For starters:

  • Pure functions have no dependence on context, so they are easy to write, easy to test, easy to read. Most importantly, they are easy to combine.
  • Referential transparency makes substitution, caching, and lazy evaluation possible – and simple.
  • Careful abstraction makes functions broadly reusable, in contrast with OO 'concretion' which aspires to encapsulation but mostly just protects your data from being reused.

To take full advantage of FP you have to think differently. In this session, you will learn how to reap the benefits above, by:

  • Programming with immutable values
  • Sharing data between persistent data structures
  • Recursing instead of looping
  • Using map, reduce, and into
  • Composing functions from the sequence library
  • Paying as you go with lazy data structures

Examples will be in Clojure, and will include a set of hands-on exercises to take home.


Stuart Halloway

About Stuart Halloway

Stuart Halloway is a founder and President of Cognitect, Inc. (www.cognitect.com). He is a Clojure committer, and a developer of the Datomic database.

Stuart has spoken at a variety of industry events, including StrangeLoop, Clojure/conj, EuroClojure, ClojureWest, SpeakerConf, QCon, GOTO, OSCON, RailsConf, RubyConf, JavaOne, and NFJS.

Stuart has written a number of books and technical articles. Of these, he is most proud of Programming Clojure.

Learn more about Stu's presentations on his wiki.

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