Clojure - FunFunFunction #5

Key Takeaways

welcome to fun fun function today we are talking about cloture more specifically the syntax of cloture I am doing this episode a wee bit hungover because yesterday was Halloween I was at a party with a scary tales theme this was my costume it's the three bears from Goldilocks so why is it a good idea to explore other languages we mostly use JavaScript on this show but we don't want to learn JavaScript we want to learn programming and to do that we need to explore and expand our horizons there is a lot of cool things about closure but I want to focus on one little detail today and that is the fact that closure has almost no syntax at all let's compare closure to JavaScript this up here this is valid JavaScript it will evaluate to 6 now here is the same thing in closure when I saw this for the first time it made me go apeshit why it's the fluff on the left this makes no sense this is because what we are looking at is almost the entire closure syntax almost all closure looks like this it's an open parenthesis parenthesis I am NOT a native English speaker and that is a hard word it's an open parenthesis then an operator and then as many operands as you like and then a closing parenthesis what what does it mean I'll show you some more examples and you'll get here is a variable declaration in JavaScript and the same one in closure we initialize the variable my ferret with the value waffles in the closure example we have our operator death most definitely short for a define and then two operands for the variable my ferret and the variable value waffles I'll show you the third example if you look at the JavaScript here we evaluate a boolean expression and then if it is true which it always is in this case we return the first statement at the question mark you can have a delicious soup and then if it's false which is average we return the no soup for you straight in the claw drip code it's the same bloody thing as the other examples it's an open parenthesis the operator is and then followed by three operands the first operand is the boolean being evaluated always true and the second operand is what we get if the boolean is true which it always is and the third operand is what we get if the boolean is false which it never is in this example so in closure it's always operator operand operand operand and close parentheses and the closure that is called a for but where are my curly brackets what if I want to do multiple things in my if statement like this if true is true we should console.log a message and then console of another message well you do it the exact same way so looking at this code you are probably now recognizing closure as that language with all the [ __ ] parentheses but joking aside I mean look at how elegant is this there is no new syntax introduced here the only new thing that we started to do is to nest forms let's go through it together our outer form starts with the operator if after that comes our first operand the boolean being evaluated which is always true and then comes another nested form with the operator - and the operator do will simply well do all of the forms that is passed to it as operands and that is these two print line forms and that's it now you know 90% of the closure syntax and it's pretty cool because most other languages have tons and tons of tons of different language constructs while in closure almost all functionality is enclosed in the operators and the simple form syntax you have watched an episode of fun fun function a weekly show where we tried to come more excited and confident about programming by exploring old wisdom wild ideas and having fun this is a weekly show released on Mondays but not next week because I am having a week off so make sure that you follow me on twitter at MP Jamie so that you don't miss out on that so until next next Monday stay curious