Transforming and sorting collections

In this section, we will review different ways of getting sorted. All you ever wanted to know about sorting Clojure collections will be in this recipe.

As usual, Clojure offers practical ways of using the same functions in generic situations so as to refine your sorting to the particular needs.

In almost all cases, the sorted collection is a new instance of the input, but we will also look at corner cases when using Clojure/Java interop, where the collection may keep an internal state to be aware of.

Getting ready

This section does not make use of any external libraries, so you can just start REPL and be ready.

How to do it...

To get a good grasp of how to use the different sorting methods, we will go through the most important functions first, and we will look at the under-the-hood functions in the next sub-section.

Using built-in sort

The built-in sort is easy to grasp and use. As with the usual Clojure functions, a new collection is created on applying sorting...