1.5. Summary

We’ve covered a lot of conceptual ground in this chapter, but it was necessary in order to define the terms used throughout the remainder of the book. Likewise, it’s important to understand Clojure’s underpinnings in order to frame the discussion for the rest of the book. If you’ve taken in the previous sections and internalized them, then congratulations: you have a solid basis for proceeding to the rest of the book. But if you’re still not sure what to make of Clojure, it’s okay—we understand that it may be a lot to take in all at once. Understanding will come gradually as we piece together Clojure’s story. For those of you coming from a functional programming background, you’ll likely have recognized much of the discussion in the previous sections, but perhaps with some surprising twists. Conversely, if your background is more rooted in object-oriented programming, then you may get the feeling that Clojure is very different than you’re accustomed to. Though in many ways this is true, in the coming chapters you’ll see how Clojure elegantly solves many of the problems that you deal with on a daily basis. Clojure approaches solving software problems from a different angle than classical object-oriented techniques, but it does so having been motivated by their fundamental strengths and shortcomings.

With this conceptual underpinning in place, it’s time to make a quick run through Clojure’s technical basics and syntax. We’ll be moving fairly quickly, but no faster than necessary to get to the deeper topics in following chapters. So hang on to your REPL, here we go...