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A modern Lisp dialect on the JVM emphasizing immutability and concurrency. ClojureScript compiles to JavaScript.
Clojure is a dynamic, functional programming language created by Rich Hickey, first released in 2007. Running on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), Clojure is a modern Lisp dialect that emphasizes immutable data structures, first-class functions, and a pragmatic approach to concurrency through its Software Transactional Memory (STM) system, atoms, agents, and core.async channels. Clojure's persistent data structures — vectors, maps, sets, and lists — provide efficient structural sharing, enabling safe concurrent access without locks. The language's homoiconicity (code is data) enables a powerful macro system that allows developers to extend the language itself.
Clojure has found strong adoption in financial services, data engineering, and web development. Companies like Nubank (one of the world's largest digital banks), Walmart, Cisco, and Netflix use Clojure for mission-critical systems. The web development ecosystem centers around Ring (HTTP abstraction), Compojure and Reitit (routing), and Hiccup (HTML templating), while ClojureScript extends the language to JavaScript environments for full-stack development. The REPL-driven development workflow, where developers interactively evaluate code in a running system, is central to the Clojure experience and is supported by excellent editor integrations like CIDER for Emacs, Calva for VS Code, and Cursive for IntelliJ.
Clojars serves as the community package repository, hosting thousands of libraries. Clojure's spec library provides runtime data validation and generative testing. The language continues to evolve under Hickey's stewardship, with recent additions like transducers and datafy/nav enhancing data processing capabilities.
Clojure's Lisp syntax with dense parenthetical nesting makes visual code review challenging, where a misplaced bracket can completely change program semantics. Macro changes can alter code generation in ways not obvious from the source.
Comparing Clojure files helps catch modifications to namespace declarations, protocol implementations, and multi-method dispatch hierarchies. Teams need structured diffs to review changes to concurrent state management (atoms, refs) where subtle modifications can introduce race conditions.
UtraDiff compares Clojure files using language-aware tokenization, highlighting keywords like defn, let, and cond alongside symbols and string literals. S-expression structure is fully highlighted, making mismatched parentheses and bracket nesting immediately visible in the diff.
Side-by-side and inline views let you trace changes across deeply nested forms, while Alt+arrow keyboard navigation jumps between changed expressions. The whitespace-ignore toggle helps filter out purely formatting-related reindentation.
Supported extensions: .clj .cljs .cljc .edn