When Should I Use Multimethods?
Multimethods are extremely flexible, and with that flexibility comes choices. How should you choose when to use multimethods, as opposed to some other technique? We approach this question from two directions, asking the following:
- Where do Clojure projects use multimethods?
- Where do Clojure projects eschew multimethods?
The most striking thing is that multimethods are rare—about one per 1,000 lines of code. So don’t worry that you’re missing something important if you build a Clojure application with few, or no, multimethods. A Clojure program that defines no multimethods isn’t nearly as odd as an object-oriented program with no polymorphism.
Many multimethods dispatch on class. Dispatch-by-class is the easiest ...
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