Rich made vector, map, and set functions, while list, and sequence are not functions. Why cannot all these collections be function to make it consistent?
Further, why don't we make all these compose data as a function which maps position to it's internal data?
If we make all these compose data as function then there will be only function and atom data in clojure. This will minimize the fundamental elements in that language right?
I believe a minimal, best only 2, set of fundamental elements would make the language simpler, more expressive and more flexible. Is this correct?
Vectors, maps, and sets are all associative data structures. Maps are the most obvious; they simply associate arbitrary keys with arbitrary values. A vector can be thought of as a map whose key set must be the set of all nonnegative integers less than the vector's size. Finally, sets can be thought of as maps that map keys to themselves.
It's important to understand that the sequential nature of a vector and the associative nature of a vector are two orthogonal things. It's a data structure that's designed to be good at supporting both abstractions (to some extent; for instance, you can't efficiently insert at the beginning of a vector).
Lists are simpler than vectors; they are finite sequential data structures, nothing more. A list can't efficiently return the element at a particular index, so it doesn't expose that functionality as part of its core interface. Of course, you can get an element of a list by index using nth
, but in that case, you're explicitly treating it as a sequence, not as an associative structure.
So to answer your question, the IFn
implementations for vectors, maps, and sets are there because of the extremely close relationship between the idea of an associative data structure and the idea of a pure function. Lists and other sequences are not inherently associative, so for consistency, they do not implement IFn
.