Chapter 11
Building an Application

Now that you’ve learned the basics of the Clojure language, it’s time to begin using Clojure in your own projects. But when you start to work on your own killer Clojure app, you’ll quickly discover that knowledge of the language is only part of what you need to work effectively. You also need to consider questions of workflow, data structures, polymorphism, testing, and more.

As our sample application, we’ll implement a version of the game Hangman where a player uncovers a word by guessing a sequence of letters. Whereas we show you all the code as we go, this chapter is not really about code. It’s about how we approach solving problems in Clojure, by focusing on how to represent our problem in data, then building functional algorithms around that data.

We’ll also look at how we can use specs to describe both our data and the functions used in the program, then test those functions with generative testing.