Aspect-Oriented Programming in Clojure

Question

How to achieve Aspect-Oriented Programming in Clojure? Do we need AOP in Clojure?
Let's say we want plain vanilla Clojure solution (no AspectJ).

Answer 1

Aspect-Oriented Programming is typically used to add cross-cutting functionality to code that would otherwise get hopelessly intertwined with business logic. A great example is logging - you don't really want logging code scattered everywhere in your code base.

You don't really need AOP in Clojure because it's easy to achieve this with other techniques in Clojure.

For example, you can use higher-order functions to "wrap" other functions with cross cutting functionality:

; a simple function - the "business logic"
(defn my-calculation [a b]
  (+ a b))

; higher order function that adds logging to any other function
(defn wrap-with-logging [func]
  (fn [& args]
    (let [result (apply func args)]
      (println "Log result: " result)
      result)))

; create a wrapped version of the original function with logging added
(def my-logged-calculation (wrap-with-logging my-calculation))

(my-logged-calculation 7 9)
=> Log result:  16
=> 16

Answer 2

AOP IMHO is just an artifact of certain kinds of static programming languages. AFAIKS it's usually just a bunch of non-standard compiler extensions. I've not yet seen any application of AOP that can't be solved better & natively in more dynamic languages. Clojure is certainly dynamic enough, and that's without even considering macros.

I may be wrong, but if so, I'd need to see an actual AOP use case that can't be implemented just as well in pure clojure.

Edit: just to be clear: I refuse to see things like elisp's advice as aspect oriented. In dynamic languages, those are just techniques to be used whenever you need them, with no need for language support other than rebinding of function definitions - which all lisps support anyway.

There's no need to treat them as special - you can easily define your own defadvice-like function in clojure. See for example, compojure's wrap! macro, which is actually deprecated since you generally don't even need it.