A little exploration of Go from a Clojure perspective

I have been looking into Go recently and I decided to find out how to do things that I usually do in Clojure. These are (a cleaned up version of) my notes.

First let's start from iterations. Clojure (as any good Lisp language) focuses on sequences. So changing a sequence into a new one is key (and super easy):

(map inc [1 2 3])

(2 3 4)

While Clojure focuses on immutability to keep things simple, Go focuses on performance. The easiest way to achieve the same is with a for loop:

list := []int{1,2,3}
for i, value := range list {
        list[i] = value + 1
}
list

[]int{
  1,
  2,
  3,

..... 
 []int{
  2,
  3,
  4,

Next Clojure focuses on data transformation and the most used data structure is the map. So let's iterate over a map's values:

(into {} (for [[k v] {:a 1 :b 2}] [k (inc v)])) 
; (update-vals {:a 1 :b 2} inc) ; clojure 1.11

{:a 2, :b 3}

In the above we use a Clojure for loop to create a new vector of key-value pairs, where they value in the pair was increased by one.

Go also comes with a map data structure which is super easy to write. Again the for loop will let us modify things:

theMap := map[string]int{"a": 1, "b": 2}
for key, value := range theMap {
        theMap[key] = value + 1
}
theMap

map[string]int{
  "a": 1,
  "b": 2,

..... 
 map[string]int{
  "a": 2,
  "b": 3,

And to complete our little exploration, I would say polymorphism is a must. In Clojure we can make interfaces via protocols:

(defprotocol StringMyself
  (who-am-i [x]))

(deftype Duck []
  StringMyself
  (who-am-i [x] "I am a duck!"))

(deftype Octopus []
  StringMyself
  (who-am-i [x] "I am an octopus!"))

(who-am-i (Octopus.))

In Go is beautifully simple as well:

type StringMyself interface {
        WhoAmI() string
}

type Duck struct {}
func (d Duck) WhoAmI () string {
        return "I am a duck!"
}
type Octopus struct {}
func (d Octopus) WhoAmI () string {
        return "I am an octopus!"
}

var o StringMyself = Octopus{}
o.WhoAmI()

..... 
  main.Octopus{
 \"I am an octopus!\""

Not bad as a first go at go. And it seems to be pretty succinct!

Happy Going!