Ep 049: Keywords! Keywords! Keywords!

Functional Design in Clojure

Each week, we discuss a different topic about Clojure and functional programming.

If you have a question you'd like us to discuss, tweet @clojuredesign, send an email to [e-mail], or join the #clojuredesign-podcast channel on the Clojurians Slack.

This week, our topic is: "Keywords! Keywords! Keywords!" We examine all the fascinating properties of keywords, how to use them, and why they're so much better than strings and enums.

Selected quotes:

• "The question of the day is: Why is there no question of the day?"
• "Everything behind the scenes should get turn into integers because that is the good and true way."
• "A FAQ after the fact."
• "We forget about identical? because Clojure gives us value semantics!"
• "Magic numbers you can spell with letters."
• "The ability of communicating with letters--something we humans have been developing for a while."
• "What is this sorcery?!"
• "JSON. That's not not a guy who likes strings."
• "Let's blame JSON."
• "If you don't have to recursively walk a tree, why recursively walk a tree?"
• "A little bit of copying is better than a lot of depending."
• "The randomly placed last one wins!"
• "Trust but verify."