Thinking in Clojure
Let's briefly discuss a handful of good practices for building real world applications in Clojure. Of course, these practices are only guidelines, and you should eventually try to establish your own set of rules and practices for writing code in Clojure:
- Minimize state and use pure functions: Most applications must inevitably use some form of state. You must always strive to reduce the amount of state you're dealing with, and implement most of the heavy lifting in pure functions. State can be managed using reference types, channels, or even monads in Clojure, thus giving us a lot of proven options. In this way, we can reduce the number of conditions that can cause any unexpected behavior in a program. Pure functions are also easier to compose and test.
- Don't forget about laziness: Laziness can be used as an alternative to solve problems that have solutions based on recursion. Although laziness does tend to simplify several aspects of functional programming...