Readable Clojure Through Threading

Clojure, like many Lisps, sometimes struggles to attract newcomers who claim it's "hard to read". Any paradigm shift requires time, but I myself struggled to read Clojure I had written early on. Nested parentheses and REPL-driven development made the result come quickly, but it often looked ugly. However, the thread operator -> and all of its cousins fix that.

A common pattern I found myself reapeating was a series of simple, composable function calls on a single value. After all, small useful functions is a big draw of Clojure. But many small functions next to one another often results in ugly and unclear code.

For example, in many ciphers, strings first need to be converted to lowercase, then stripped of the whitespace characters. The quick way to do that in Clojure is

This isn't too hard to read, but it gets more difficult as functions are added. If it's determined that somehow the cipher is made stronger by reversing the string, this becomes

Already this is getting a bit unwieldy. The thread operator simplifies this to:

The thread operator here inserts s as the argument to str/lower-case, then inserts that entire form, (str/lower-case s), as the first argument in str/replace, and so on. As a result, it's functionally equivalent, but now any humans reading it can see clearly that you would take the string, first lower-case it, then replace the whitespace, then reverse.

But, when we start working with collections, we see that we need something new. -> threads things as the first argument to a function, while most functions that deal with collections take the collection last. Here, we want to use the ->> operator, also known as the thread-last operator.

Again, using our cipher example, let's say we have a function that takes a string, filters all characters removing whitespace, converts a character to an integer, and applies an encoding function. In the inside-out style, this would be

However, with the ->> operator, we can simplify this to

These two operators alone will simplify and clarify a lot of Clojure functions, but there are a few more obscure threading operators that can be very useful.

First is some->. The some threading macro can be thought of as a short-circuit, or nil-safe threading. With some->, whenever the result of one line is nil, the expression immediately returns nil.

For example, code that would imperatively be written as

can instead be refactored to be

Next on the obscure threading macros is cond->. The conditional threading macro works much like cond, but with the addition of threading. It takes an even number of forms, and for each pair, if the first is true, execute the second according to usual threading rules.

For example, if you have a series of functions that only need to be executed under certain circumstances, instead of

we can instead write this as

I personally like using cond-> as a way to conditionally associate elements in a map. When building up a body for a request, a common pattern might be

It is worth noting that both cond-> and some-> have thread-last versions as well, cond->> and some->>.

The last threading macro is as->, which only comes in one type. as-> is useful if you want to mix thread first and thread last macros.

For example, let's say we don't know about the ability to filter, as we did in the ->> example. That might lead us to write the function as

It would not take much to make this even more complex. Instead, we can use as->, which instead of passing things as the first or last argument, assigns the previous form to a symbol for use in future expressions. For example, the previous function can be rewritten as

Now, you're fully equipped to simplify your code with threading macros. It's worth noting that I left out one big detail for stylistic reasons, namely that parenthesis are optional when referring to a single function. I prefer always adding them, as it results in the expressions lining up.

As with any technique, you can overuse this and make your code just as unreadable through long and complicated threading macros. But when used judiciously, they enhance readability.