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Becoming a Functional Programmer with Clojure

Destructuring

Explore how to use destructuring in Clojure to bind values from lists, vectors, sequences, and maps within functions. Understand sequential and associative destructuring, including working with nested maps and keyword arguments, to write clearer and more concise functional code.

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What is destructuring?

Destructuring is probably one of the most unique concepts that Clojure offers because we can't compare it to anything we know in other languages. It’s a very powerful and useful tool that allows us to make better code and leave it in a much more functional programming style with a reduced number of lines.

Destructuring is the ability to bind names or symbols to the values inside of a data structure without having to access those values. It’s most common with collections. Let’s see some examples before getting into its explanation.

Destructuring of lists, vectors, and sequences

This is also known as sequential destructuring. Let's see an example:

Clojure
; Defining the vector with 4 elements
(def my-vec [1 2 3 4])
; Defining a function that will receive this vector as a parameter,
; will use the first element to be added to the third,
; and will multiply it by the sum of the second with the fourth
(defn weird-calculation
 [[first-e second-e third-e fourth-e]] ; Notice how we receive the parameter already open
 (println "first-e" first-e 
          "second-e" second-e 
          "third-e" third-e 
          "fourth-e" fourth-e)
 
 (* (+ first-e third-e) (+ second-e fourth-e)))
(println "Response"
 (weird-calculation my-vec))

Notice that we received the ...