Hello Timothy, Thank you for the response. I've given much thought to your examples and it quickly became clear how relevant defprotocol and deftype is. I had no idea Clojure provided a mechanism for strongly typed structures like that. I've started re-designing my library around this concept and even with my limited understanding, the code is becoming much cleaner and simpler!
So thank you for that. I had a question about designing with defprotocol. While trying to implement my protocol "Network", I was struggling with deciding what signature to use. Is it better to write lots of functions that compute stuff given a concrete input. Or it is better to write functions that return "new versions" of the inputted data? I guess my question comes down to how other people use libraries. Is there a definitive standard or guide for structuring libraries in Clojure? One other question was whether methods can be marked "internal" within a protocol? Thank you for your time. -SharpCoder On Wednesday, July 2, 2014 9:17:25 AM UTC-7, tbc++ wrote: > > defstruct is deprecated. You should use defrecord or deftype instead. You > can define operations on these via defprotocol. > > And you can even type hint the members: > > (defprotocol IScale > (scale [this ^double amount])) > > (deftype Point [^double x ^double y] > IScale > (scale [this amount] > (Point. (* x amount) (* y amount)))) > > (scale (Point. 10 1)) > > Timothy > > > > On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 9:41 AM, SharpCoder <[email protected] > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> As an exercise, I'm trying to port a library that I originally wrote in >> C#. It's actually a Neural Network, so my imperative design was a pretty >> straightforward tree-like structure of nodes that could manipulate state. >> During my port to Clojure, I've been writing functions that take multiple >> arrays (typically "graph of outputs" and "graph of weights"). Then I >> remembered about structs, so I refactored my code to deal with a collection >> of structs "node". A node contains a vector of weights and an output. In >> this way, I am only passing around a single collection that can represent >> my whole neural network. >> >> Now I'm running into the fact that I kind of need to update the >> structure. So what I've implemented is essentially, each time you calculate >> the network output - my code iterates over the list of structs and creates >> new ones with the "updated" values. Performance is something that people >> don't seem to talk about much with Clojure, but I'm kind of thinking my >> approach with structs might not be the best one. >> >> My question is, am I approaching this incorrectly? I've seen a lot of >> resources that deal with the syntax of Clojure but haven't found a good >> guide on actual application design. My usage of structures seems natural to >> me, but that makes me question it even more! >> >> For anyone interested, here is my code: https://www.refheap.com/87775 >> I'm going to open source the library after many many iterations to >> beautify it. I'm sure it's a bit too haphazard to make sense to right now... >> >> Thank you for your time! >> -SharpCoder >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >> Groups "Clojure" group. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected] >> <javascript:> >> Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with >> your first post. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> [email protected] <javascript:> >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en >> --- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Clojure" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to [email protected] <javascript:>. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > > > > -- > “One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that–lacking > zero–they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C > programs.” > (Robert Firth) > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
