Chapter 1. Clojure philosophy
This chapter covers
Learning a new language generally requires significant investment of thought and effort, and it is only fair that programmers expect each language they consider learning to justify that investment. Clojure was born out of creator Rich Hickey’s desire to avoid many of the complications, both inherent and incidental, of managing state using traditional object-oriented techniques. Thanks to a thoughtful design based in rigorous programming language research, coupled with a fervent look toward practicality, Clojure has blossomed into an important programming language playing an undeniably important role in the current state of the art in language design. On one side of the equation, Clojure utilizes Software Transactional Memory (STM), agents, a clear distinction between identity and value types, arbitrary polymorphism, and functional programming to provide an environment conducive to making sense of state in general, and especially in the face of concurrency. On the other side, Clojure shares a symbiotic relationship with the Java Virtual Machine, thus allowing prospective developers to avoid the costs of maintaining yet another infrastructure while leveraging existing libraries.