Cookbooks
Clojure
Chapter 5. Good Coding Practices
Organizing code into functions

Clojure:
Organizing code into functions

How to:

Clojure functions are defined with defn, followed by a name, parameters, and body. Here’s a quick example.

(defn greet [name]
  (str "Hello, " name "!"))

(greet "Alex") ; => "Hello, Alex!"

Now let’s say we want to calculate the area of a rectangle. Instead of bungling it all together, we separate it into two functions:

(defn area [length width]
  (* length width))

(defn print-area [length width]
  (println "The area is:" (area length width)))

(print-area 3 4) ; => The area is: 12

Deep Dive

Way back, coders would just smash all their logic into a single block. It was ugly. Then structured programming came along, and functions turned into a thing. In Clojure, every function is first-class—you can sling them around like any other value.

Alternatives? Some folks might mess with multi-methods or higher-order functions, but those are just spices in the function stew.

All in a function’s details: they’re immutable in Clojure, making side-effect muddles less likely. They lean heavily on recursion instead of typical loops, which meshes well with the language’s functional paradigms.

See Also

LoggingRefactoring