Exercise: Programming language ages revisited
Lets take the programming language ages exercise and use a collection for the ages. Does this change how we work with the numbers?
The programming language ages in a vector collection: [10 27 26 21 22 22 45 34 59 60].
Find the age of the youngest programming language
How could you find the smallest number?
The ages are not in order, so you cant just get the first value.
If only the values were sorted...
()
(first (sort [10 27 26 21 22 22 45 34 59 60]))
The min function will simplify our expression but we need to pass the individual numbers
(min 10 27 26 21 22 22 45 34 59 60)
To use min with the vector collection, we would need to use the apply function and give min and the vector as its arguments.
The apply function essentially re-writes the code so that every element in the vector becomes an argument to the min function.
(apply min [10 27 26 21 22 22 45 34 59 60])
;; becomes
(min 10 27 26 21 22 22 45 34 59 60)
There are over 600 functions in clojure.core so there is often a function you are looking for to simplify you code
The more languages we have, the more useful a collection becomes.
We could also use a function called count to get the total number of items in a collection.
Average age of programming languages updated
Calculate the average age of the programming languages
using local assignment let
and count function.
()
Hint
The apply function allows a function that takes a single argument, like +, to be used with a collection.
(apply + [2 3 4]) ;=> 9