Khader Syed

Little nuggets in Clojure and Python

With any new language, as you proceed to use it and learn, you figure out ways to do certain things. For e.g., often times I want to know what the type a certain result or a variable is.

It’s a good thing both Clojure and Python have a REPL.

In clojure, if you wanted to find the type or class of something, you would go:

claws.core=> (map * [3 4] [1 2]) (3 8) claws.core=> (class (map * [3 4] [1 2])) clojure.lang.LazySeq claws.core=> (type (map * [3 4] [1 2])) clojure.lang.LazySeq

What if I wanted to find the functions in a namespace[1]? From StackOverflow:

claws.core=> (keys (ns-publics 'clojure.tools.cli)) (summarize parse-opts cli)

If you wanted to find the type of a class or a variable in python, you would use python’s builtin function type thusly:

>>> import boto.ec2 as ec2 >>> conn=ec2.connect_to_region('us-east-1') >>> type(conn) <class 'boto.ec2.connection.EC2Connection'>

And if you wanted to get the modules, functions etc., of a class in python, you would use inspect[2]:

>>> import inspect >>> >>> inspect.getmembers(inspect, predicate=inspect.isbuiltin) [('currentframe', )]

[1] More info about clojure namespaces is available here.

[2] Inspect module’s documentation is here.