> Clojure

“Read Me Clojure” is a programming manual for one of the more flexible and expressive languages designed for communication between humans and machines.

What is abstraction in computer programming? Explanations and code examples in Clojure and Python.

Last night I received an e-mail in which one of my visitors asked me a few questions after reading the post about parsing phone numbers in Clojure. The question was seemingly simple and concerned a technical detail of software construction, but in reality the reader touched on a very important subject that I had been pondering years ago, and I decided to summarise it here.

Data types allow us to classify values according to various characteristics and to establish relations between the resulting classes. This helps the programmer define operations performed on data of different kinds, and it helps language mechanisms manage memory and detect certain kinds of errors. In Clojure, we deal with several interrelated type systems that we can extend, and by leveraging their polymorphic mechanisms, we are able to abstract data management and build unified information exchange interfaces.

Data structures, alongside algorithms expressed as operations, are a fundamental component of every computer program. When building applications, we choose structures that will be best suited for processing data within our adopted model.

The specific syntax of Lisp dialects allows one to precisely define and distinguish basic constructs, add new syntactic elements, and even transform program code while it is running. This stems from the use of simple yet well-thought-out ways of organizing and representing source code.