Part of the reason the Clojure code is ugly is because he's basically doing imperative code in a functional language. Here's my (highly annotated) take: (n

Part of the reason the Clojure code is ugly is because he's basically doing imperative code in a functional language. Here's my (highly annotated) take: (ns nurblizer.core (:gen-class) (:use compojure.core) (:require [clojure.string :as str] [clostache.render :as clostache] [ring.adapter.jetty :only run-jetty] [compojure.handler :only site])) ;; main nurble stuff (def nouns (->> (-> (slurp (clojure.java.io/resource "nouns.txt")) ; read in nouns.txt (str/split #"\n")) ; split by line (map (comp str/trim str/upper-case)) ; feed the lines through upper-case and trim set)) ; transform into a set (def nurble-replacement-text "<span class=\"nurble\">nurble</span>") (defn nurble-word [word] (get nouns (str/upper-case word) nurble-replacement-text)) ; return word if word in set else nurble (defn nurble [text] (str/replace text #"\n|\w+" #(case % ; using anon func literal, switch on argument "\n" "<br>" ; when arg is newline replace with br (nurble-word %)))) ; otherwise nurble the argument (a word) ;; webserver stuff (defn read-template [template-file] (slurp (clojure.java.io/resource (str "templates/" template-file ".mustache")))) (defn render ([template-file params] (clostache/render (read-template template-file) params {:_header (read-template "_header") :_footer (read-template "_footer") }))) (defroutes main-routes (GET "/" [] (render "index" {})) (POST "/nurble" [text] (render "nurble" {:text (nurble text)}))) (defn -main [] (run-jetty (site main-routes) {:port 9000})) The result is the same but the approach is different: build a set of uppercase nouns, define how each word in the text is handled, and do a single string replacement pass over the text to produce the output. Doing things like tokenizing the text and processing it as a seq or keeping the nouns lower case and producing upper case output are easy but seem like unnecessary complications so I left them out. Note: In the grand tradition of the exercise, the webserver stuff is untested. I did repl-check the nurble part but was too lazy to set up a project.clj and have leiningen pull in the webserver deps.