Clojure and FP - First impressions

This blog entry is to report my achievements with Clojure and Functional Programming (see my previous post).

What I do not like

The first thing that one faces when trying to use Clojure is the difficulty in installing it. The downloads page only lists a few zip files, without saying anything about how to use them. (Sure, there is a Readme file, but I would have like to know something more before downloading anything.) In comparison, the Downloads page of Scala is much better in shape, and a number of pre-built packages are provided. Moreover, Scala is included in Macports, while Clojure is not. Once the ZIP file has been uncompressed, the Readme file is extremely laconic: it just reports the command required to run/build Clojure. Since the REPL has no editing facilities (i.e. you cannot use Backspace/delete to modify what you have written, and there is no history), I would have expected some reference to jLine or rlwrap as these can really save you the day.

In general, Clojure shows its young age in a number of other spots. The documentation is quite sparse, and you often have to look at the source code of some function in order to understand its behavior. Many tools I regularly use for source code (e.g. Vim, Source-highlight and others) do not have native support for Clojure (although you can usually find something in the Web - I find VimClojure one of the best Vim plugins I have ever seen, the "rainbow parentheses" mode is incredibly useful!).

What I like

Being a LISP dialect, Clojure can be extremely elegant. Here is some code I wrote to solve problem 34 from Project Euler.

A few things worth to note:

• Clojure implements a large number of high-level data structures, like dictionaries. I used the latters in fast-fact, a dictionary whose keys are the 10 digits and whose values are the corresponding factorials.
• It is really easy to call Java functions like toString: just prepend them with a dot. No need to import modules to do this!
• Although Clojure is a dynamically typed language (like e.g. Python), it allows to specify the type of the input parameters for functions and let bindings. I have verified that this allows to dramatically increase the speed of the code (3x or 4x times).
• Like Python, Clojure allows to use docstrings. They can be accessed from the REPL through the doc function.

Python vs. Clojure

Since I am an avid Python user, I immediately rewrote the program in Python:

I tried to follow the same logic used in the Clojure program, i.e. using a dictionary for the first 10 factorials and getting the list of digits for a number by first converting it to a string (an alternative would be to repeatedly apply division and modulus 10). Then, using the Clojure time function and the IPython %time command, I was able to record the times used by each program. In order to get sounder values, I repeated each measurement till the timing did not change significatively any more.

Results are shown in the plot on the right. They look quite impressive: as shown by the following graph, type hints allow Clojure to be more than three times faster than Python. Even not using type hints would have allowed Clojure to be approximately 20% faster than Python.

Preliminary conclusions

Despite its young age and a few rough edges, my overall impression is extremely positive: Clojure is really nice to use and the number of features it provides are extremely interesting. Its speed is also remarkable.