Updated April 15, 2023
Introduction to Clojure
A dynamic and general-purpose programming language which is a combination of interactive development of a scripting language and approachability providing a robust and efficient infrastructure for programming in multithreading and although Clojure is a compiled language, it supports every feature at runtime, becoming completely dynamic and easy to access to Java frameworks with type inference and type hints that are optional and is provided by Clojure which is a functional programming language consisting of persistent and immutable data structures and it offers a reactive agent system and software transactional memory system when a mutable state is necessary to make correct, clean multithreaded designs are available.
The necessity to Use Clojure
- It is a powerful, coherent, and simple tool consisting of a set of useful features.
- It provides a dynamic environment to interact with. Most of the language constructs in Clojure can be changed, and thus a program can be grown by loading the data, adding the features, fixing bugs, testing in an unbroken stream.
- It belongs to the Lisp family of languages adding the features code as data and macrosystem to Clojure.
- The multithreaded programming is simplified in Clojure because of the immutable data structures sharing between the threads.
- Clojure provides Certail tools to avoid mutable state functions provided as first-class objects and side effect-based looping replaced by recursive iteration.
- A flexible, powerful, and simple mechanism is provided by Clojure to support run-time polymorphism. Systems using run-time polymorphism can be changed and extended easily.
- It shares the JVM type system, threads, etc., and hence it is a hosted language whose functions are compiled bytecode in JVM. Clojure supports the dynamic implementation of interfaces and classes in Java.
Working of Clojure
- It is a dynamic, functional, and high-level programming language whose design is based on a programming language called LISP, consisting of compilers which allow it to run on a run time environment of both Java and .Net.
- LISP programming language does not have syntax, which is a tiny language providing a powerful macro feature.
- The coding in it is smaller than other programming languages as it is based on the LISP programming language.
- It consists of an immutable data structure not allowing changes to the objects created, and hence it’s a functional programming language.
- The state of an application for the programmer is managed by conjure.
- Concurrency is supported by conjure.
- It can embrace existing programming languages.
- Clojure as a programming language can be dealt with in two ways, namely Leiningen and Eclipse plugin.
- Clojure projects can be created, built, and automated using a tool called Leiningen.
- The development of Clojure can be done in Eclipse Integrated Development Environment using a plugin in Eclipse called CounterClockwise.
- The Clojure program files are saved with the .clj extension.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Given below are the advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
- It is a dynamic, functional, and high-level programming language whose design is based on a programming language called LISP, consisting of compilers which allow it to run on a run time environment of both Java and .Net.
- LISP programming language does not have syntax, which is a tiny language providing a powerful macro feature.
- The coding in it is smaller than other programming languages as it is based on the LISP programming language.
- It consists of an immutable data structure not allowing changes to the objects created, and hence it’s a functional programming language.
- The state of an application for the programmer is managed by conjure.
- Concurrency is supported by conjure.
- It can embrace existing programming languages.
- As a programming language, it can be dealt with in two ways, namely Leiningen and Eclipse plugin.
- It provides rapid prototyping as it is a dynamically typed language.
Disadvantages:
- The primitive types in Clojure are all Java primitives, and performance penalties must be paid by Clojure run time while trying to wrap all the Java primitives.
- Exception handling and exceptions are handled in Clojure by wrapping Java libraries, and in a production-ready environment, care must be taken to handle the exceptions well to avoid stack traces.
- The compiler throws a Java stack trace error in Clojure as Clojure is an interpreted language built above another run time. This makes it very difficult to rectify the problem as we cannot be sure if the cause of the error is a Java problem or conjure problem.
- Clojure as a programming language has a complex set of rules, and hence the learning curve for conjure is the highest of any programming language.
- The only editor supporting the Clojure development model is a working prototype of an editor based on REPL called Light Table. But Light Table has a small ecosystem of plugins which can be scaled to large projects only.
- LISP programming experience is better only on a platform called Paredit. Code structuring is impossible in LISP unless the code is written on the Paredit platform; otherwise, it is difficult to make changes in the code.
- It is not the ideal tool for short scripts and command-line utilities because the programs which need milliseconds to run consume one or two seconds of initialization time due to bootstrapping JVM and Clojure runtime cost.
- Static typing and explicit typing are not supported in Clojure, making prototyping slower and difficult.
- It does not have a vibrant ecosystem of users who can help, frameworks, and libraries for common tasks and applications yet.
Applications
Different applications are mentioned below:
- Some of the applications in Clojure have enabled desktop creation and applications based on the web.
- The desktop application in Clojure is created using a library called to see-saw.
- config! An option can be used to change the value of the text on the desktop.
- A modal dialog box can be displayed using the alert method of the see-saw class on the desktop.
- Buttons class in Clojure enables to display of the buttons on the desktop.
- Labels class in Clojure enables to display of the labels on the desktop.
- Text class in Clojure enables to display of the text on the desktop.
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This is a guide to Clojure. Here we discuss the introduction, use, working, advantages, disadvantages, and applications, respectively. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –
