clojure-life

What is it

This project consists of a series of implementations of Conway's Life in Clojure. These implementations were done both as kata for learning and practice and as fodder for a set of talks that I will be doing around these implementations.

Versions

Each version is in a separate file to facilitate easy comparison. It's hard to say which one is the best... they explore different styles of data representation, concurrency, etc.

This ordering is how I wrote them and can be used to illustrate some evolution:

• life1 - my first attempt
• life_seq - a rewrite making better use of seqs and functional data
• life_prot - introducing a protocol around the core data
• life_sparse - swap data impl under protocol to only hold live cells

Build and run

The project can be compiled with leiningen. I usually just use the code interactively via a repl. Each file so far has a main entry point with a function called "life" that takes an initial world (that can be created by "init-world") and the number of iterations to compute.

There is also a test-glider function that runs "life" on a 10x10 world with an initial glider.

License

• Copyright (C) 2011 Alex Miller
• Distributed under the Apache 2 License