> Clojure gives you the tools to make simple abstractions easy to build and understand.
I understand if you don't want to take the time, but I would love it if you could you give an example of an abstraction that you can build in Closure that you would consider "easy to understand", yet which couldn't be built just with, say, anonymous functions, structs, arrays, and simple loops?
Macros allow things like core.async (like Go's channels), which is just a normal library; you didn't have to upgrade your Clojure version or anything.
Immutable datastructures make your life simpler because you're not worried about values mutating suddenly. Keeps you from cloning or locking an object. And undo is simpler: you don't destroy old state by mutating it, so you can just hold onto old versions.
I think it comes down to expressing your intent in terms of that intent rather than confining it to imperative constructs. Pretty much any work on collections of items is generally simpler and more in line with the semantics of your intentions when working with Clojure or other functional languages or structures, especially when parallel code is involved.
I'd say a specific example would be pmap. It's very difficult to parallelize code as simply as pmap does without functional programming constructs.
Hm. I'm looking at the implementation[1] of pmap.... I don't fully understand the implementation (can anyone point me to something that explains what rets is? Googling "clojure rets" doesn't return anything useful) but it appears to just be looping through the list and parcelling work out to multiple processors. That seems like something simple enough to do in any language with threads and function references, no?
I'll dig in some more though. Thanks for the reference.
To me it comes down to what my intent with the code is.
I could write a few simple routines in Go that certain get the job done without much code, but when I read the code I have to perform more mental translation from how the code is written to what my intent was.
In contrast, pmap or other constructs such as PLINQ get the same work done with less code that expresses my intent more clearly.
I understand if you don't want to take the time, but I would love it if you could you give an example of an abstraction that you can build in Closure that you would consider "easy to understand", yet which couldn't be built just with, say, anonymous functions, structs, arrays, and simple loops?