My Ruby-meta-fu isn't that strong. In fact, this might be a terrible idea. Suggestions welcome.

Want to use Clojure's persistent, lazy data structures and concurrency primitives, but afraid of parentheses? Try it from Ruby.

Tested on JRuby 1.6.4 with Clojure 1.3.0.

Here's an example translated from Joy of Clojure with the STM caveat mentioned above.

Usage

require 'familiar'

Functions in clojure.core are mapped to the Familiar module, replacing hyphens with underscores:

(clojure.core/hash-map "a" 1 "b" 2) 

becomes:

Familiar.hash_map "a", 1, "b" 2

Some functions have additional Ruby sugar. See below.

Use Familiar.with if you don't feel like writing Familiar over and over:

Familiar.with do
  reduce fn {|acc,v| acc + v}, 0, range(100)
end
=> 4950

The Familiar module defines [ns, var] and [var] methods for getting vars directly. This necessary if you want to pass an existing Clojure function to a higher-order function, e.g.

Familiar.with do
  map self[:inc], vector(2, 4, 6)
end
=> (3, 5, 7)

Similarly, the ns method will return a Familiar::NS object which has require and [var] methods:

cs = Familiar.ns("clojure.set").require
cs[:union]
=> #'clojure.set/union
cs.union Familiar.hash_set(1, 2), Familiar.hash_set(2, 3)
=> #{1 2 3}

A note on IRB Usage

Most Clojure datastructes (maps, sets, etc) will print out in IRB the same as in the Clojure REPL. The one difference is that lazy sequences will never print out automatically. This is because IRB will always try to print the result of the last expression so something like this:

irb(main):001:0> x = Familiar.repeatedly Familiar[:rand]

will lock up IRB as it tries to print the infinite sequence. The Clojure REPL, on the other hand, doesn't try to print the value of a newly def'd var so you don't have this problem.

So, to inspect the value of a finite lazy sequence in IRB, use the inspect! method:

irb(main):001:0> f = Familiar
=> Familiar
irb(main):002:0> x = f.repeatedly f[:rand]
=> #<Java::ClojureLang::LazySeq:0x4ab3a5d1>
irb(main):003:0> f.take(2, x)
=> #<Java::ClojureLang::LazySeq:0x7361b0bc>
irb(main):004:0> f.take(2, x).inspect!
=> "(0.5428756368923673 0.598041516780956)"

Type Conversions

The to_clojure method is added to Ruby data structures so you can easily convert from Ruby literals to Clojure persistent structures. For example, this Ruby code:

[[1, 2, 3], {"hi" => "bye", :foo => [4, 5, 6]}].to_clojure

is equivalent to this Clojure code:

[[1 2 3] {"hi" "bye", :foo [4, 5, 6]}]

Note that Ruby Symbols are converted to Clojure keywords.

Similarly, Clojure data structures can be converted to equivalent, native, data structures using the to_ruby method.

Functions

Make a function from a proc or lambda:

irb> Familiar.fn(lambda {|v| v * 2}).invoke(4)
=> 8

or just a block:

irb> Familiar.fn {|v| v * 2}.invoke(4)
=> 8

Persistent data structures

# Create a vector
v = Familiar.vector 1, 2, 3, 4
v.nth 2 
w = v.assoc 2 "hi"

# Create a map
v = Familiar.hash_map "a", 1, "b", 2
w = v.assoc "c", 3
w["c"] -> 3

Atoms

a = Familiar.atom(99)
a.swap! |v|
  v + 1
end
a.deref -> 100
a.reset! 101
a.deref -> 101

Refs and STM

r = Familiar.ref(99)
Familiar.dosync do
  r.alter {|v| v + 1}
end
r.deref -> 100

Agents

a = Familiar.agent(99)
a.send_ do |v|
  java.lang.Thread.sleep 10000
  v + 1
end
a.deref -> 99
# ... 10 seconds later ...
a.deref -> 100

Note that it's send_, not send since that conflicts with the built-in Ruby method with that name.

Sequences

Here's how you can make a lazy sequence

def my_range(n)
  Familiar.lazy_seq do
    if n == 0
      nil
    else
      Familiar.cons n, my_range(n - 1)
    end
  end
end

Use clojure.core/reduce to convert to a Ruby vector:

irb> Familiar.reduce Familiar.fn {|acc,v| acc << v}, [], Familiar.range(5)
=> [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]

Futures

Make a future:

f = Familiar.future do
  puts "I'm run on some other thread and return a value later"
  "return value"
end

...

f.get -> "return value"

Examples

# Primes example from clojure docs
# http://clojuredocs.org/clojure_core/clojure.core/reduce
Familiar.with do
  reduce fn { |primes,number|
          if some(self[:zero?], map(fn {|x| number % x}, primes))
            primes
          else
            conj(primes, number)
          end
        },
        vector(2),
        take(100, iterate(self[:inc], 3))
end
=> [2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 ... 67 71 73 79 83 89 97 101]

License

Copyright (C) 2011 Dave Ray

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License.