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Does working in two pseudo OO Languages for 10 years make you an expert in OO? In one of his talks he mentions that he ended up writing java in such a way that

Does working in two pseudo OO Languages for 10 years make you an expert in OO? In one of his talks he mentions that he ended up writing java in such a way that all his classes were static ones. Again, he clearly hadn't figured out that instantiating an immutable object is a way of partially applying multiple related functions at once. A brief look at this site for the other "OOFeatureButNotOOBecauseItHasADifferentName" finds this gem Clojure multimethods are a simple yet powerful mechanism for runtime polymorphism that is free of the trappings of OO, types and inheritance. This guy just doesn't get it and I am tired of him being held up as an authority.

cutler 10y ago
Neither he nor I ever claimed he was an OOP expert. I was merely defending him from your accusation that he doesn't get OOP at all. I think it's the other way round - maybe you don't get Rich Hickey's innovative contributions. Clojure is a reaction against the OOP approach in general, not limited to the implementations in Java and C++. If you'd followed his work you would have noticed that many times he defines the OOP problem as the conflation of data and functions. Tying up data and methods in classes and objects creates complexity which Clojure was designed to untangle. In that he has succeeded where CL failed. Clojure is arguably the first lisp to gain mainstream adoption and for that alone Rich Hickey deserves the respect of all lisp/scheme advocates.