Clojure
clojure-logo.png
Appeared in 2007
Designed by Rich Hickey
Typing discipline dynamic, strong
Influenced by Lisp, ML, Haskell, Erlang
License Eclipse Public License
Website http://clojure.org

Let's start with quoting Rich Hickey's words from Clojure's website.

Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs.

With our words,

  • Among its alternatives, Clojure has one of the most complete concurrency frameworks (Refs, Agents, Atoms, and STM a.k.a. Software Transactional Memory) built into the programming language itself. Moreover, its immutable data structures and functional design plays an important role to back this design up.
  • Seamless integration with Java world (where every Clojure function is Callable/Runable from Java side of view, and you can access Java variables/functions/classes/packages from Clojure with great ease) brings you the access to all available Java libraries in the wild.
  • Builtin support for lazy evaluation shines with its ease of use and seamless integration into the language.

Reference Resources

Books

Other Resources

Communities

Libraries

Editors

Editor Tweaks: Emacs

While you can reuse emacs lisp-mode (not SLIME!) tweaks mentioned in Common Lisp, for Clojure, we recommend you to install SLIME, clojure-mode and swank-clojure using ELPA package manager1 for emacs. (See ELPA website for installation instructions of packages.) After installating SLIME, clojure-mode, and swank-clojure via ELPA, just call clojure-install function from emacs.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License