Why Clojure?

Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition — by Dmitri Sotnikov, Scot Brown (5 / 107)

👈 What You Need | TOC | Why Make Web Apps in Cl ojure? 👉

Clojure is a small language whose primary goals are simplicity and correctness. As a functional language, it emphasizes immutability and declarative programming. As you’ll see, these features make it easy and idiomatic to write clean and correct code.

Web development has many languages to choose from and as many opinions on what makes a language “good.” Some languages are simple but verbose. You’ve probably heard people say that verbosity doesn’t matter — that if two languages are Turing complete, anything that can be written in one language can also be written in the other with a bit of extra code. We think that’s missing the point.

The real question isn’t whether something can be expressed in principle; it’s how well the language maps to the problem being solved. One language lets you think in terms of your problem domain, while another forces you to translate the problem to its constructs.

The latter is often tedious and rarely enjoyable. You end up writing a lot of boilerplate code and constantly repeating yourself. There’s a certain irony in having to write repetitive code.

At the other extreme, some languages are concise because they provide many different tools for solving problems. Unfortunately, this vast array of tools brings different problems.