Clojure concurrency and some niceties

I stumbled upon the barber problem at some webpage I don't remember; it was a loose and open approach to it. I then imagined my own version and implemented that in Clojure (I'll put the code as a Gist, even though the style just does not match this blog's). Basically, I want to adjust the rate of customers entering the barber shop to a little faster than the barber can dispatch one customer.

To do that, I create two functions, one that increases the queue of customers (with the shop supporting up to 3 customers) amd one that dispatces customers, decreasing the queue. I assume 4 hours for customers to be able to take a seat (the barber's will close after 4 hours and cut the remaining wating customers).


Notice here that the barber cuts the hair only if a random number meets a condition (here making him slower than his customers). I implement this with a watcher function, that gets called whenever the reference changes. In order to be called every time a customer enter the shop, we need to issue and identity change, that does not change the value of the queue but fires the watcher. This is a very nice feature of Clojure.

The important functional element is this

  (let [f (if (< @queue 3) inc identity)]
    (dosync (alter queue f)) ))

Notice the conditional assignment to the variable in the let block. This removes the boilerplate code needed in the expression section within the let block.