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Learning Clojure in Public - Week 3 Day 6 (20/35)

Expectations

I am mostly taking it easy today, it's the weekend after all, so mostly some reading of chapter 9 of Brave Clojure.

What I learned

Concurrency

Concurrency refers to managing more than one task at the same time. It is possible to tell Clojure to do a task concurrently by placing it on a JVM thread.

Futures

(future (Thread/sleep 4000)
        (println "I'll print after 4 seconds"))
(println "I'll print immediately")

As seen before in Clojure from the Ground Up, future puts the computation in a different thread, which leaves the main thread available to process something else.

The future function returns a reference value that you can use to request the result. This process is called dereferencing. You can do this with the deref function or @ before the variable.

(let [result (future (println "this prints once")
                     (+ 1 1))]
  (println "deref: " (deref result))
  (println "@: " @result)); => "this prints once"; => deref: 2; => @: 2

Dereferencing will block if the future hasn't resolved the value just yet.

Something new (that I didn't know yet) is that you can place a limit on how long to wait for a future.

(deref (future (Thread/sleep 1000) 0) 10 5)
; => 5

This code tells deref to return the value 5 if the future doesn’t return a value within 10 milliseconds.

realized? is a function that tells you if the future is done running.

Delays

Delays allow you to define a task without having to execute it or require the result immediately. You can create a delay using delay:

  (delay (let [message "Just call my name and I'll be there"]
           (println "First deref:" message)
           message)))

To get the value you can deref but also force which returns it earlier.

4Clojure problem 95: to tree or not to tree?

In this case, if something is nil, it's okay, if a collection has three items it's okay, if any of its second and third element are also satisfying tree? it's okay as well. Which gives us the following solution:

(fn tree? [xs]
  (cond
   (or (seq? xs) (vector? xs)) (and (= 3 (count xs)) (tree? (nth xs 1)) (tree? (nth xs 2)))
   (nil? xs) true
   :else false))

Takeaways

Let's end this (rest) day with a tally of what I completed:

  • First half of Chapter 9 of Clojure for the Brave and True
  • 1 4clojure problems