My friend Matt wrote a pretty rad (yep, I used that word) implementation of the “sleeping barber” program in Clojure. Matt’s code had an almost sentence-like simplicity to it – pithy but expressive – that impressed me.
As we walked through how the program worked, I couldn’t help but wonder about a Java implementation. So, I wrote one.
Matt’s is self-contained in one file while mine is split across multiple files. (I opted to not use anonymous/inner classes.) I think we were a bit surprised that the concurrency logic is similar and the ”main” driving section of each implementation follows the same set-up procedure. Perhaps my code was influenced by way of transliteration?
I’m struck by how Matt’s Clojure programs reads somewhat like a story while my Java program reads like instructions for a computer.