Mastermind in Clojure and Java

Have you heard of mastermind? It’s a logic game in which one player repeatedly tries determine the secret code that another player set at the beginning. With each guess, the player is given information on how many correct pegs his guess contains, and how many are in the correct position. For more details on the rules, check the wikipedia article.

I built a Clojure implementation of Mastermind as a learning project. (Code and details of functionality at github.) My primary goals were to gain familiarity with the language, and to see what the functional programming paradigm feels like when working on a project that is larger than one big function. After I finished, I re-implemented (almost) all of the features in Java for a comparison. (Code also available at github.) Interested in the results? read on.