11 ms·

Rich Hickey's response to “On whose authority?”

124 points by disaster01 9y ago

hellofunk 9y ago
Hard to deny he has a good way with words! I can't speak for the author Rich is replying to, but I have seen many in the community comment on the opaqueness of Cognitect, even comparing it to Apple. That's not necessarily bad, but it does have the unfortunate effect of letting some people's imaginations run with negativity in their assumptions about a company's motivations. Even if Cognitect did make money on Clojure, not sure why that should be a source of frustration. It's quite an amazing language, people should have some reward for their contributions to the industry, right?
khazhou 9y ago
This kind of drama is not healthy for technology. Do yourself a favor and don't waste time reading this, nor the original article it's responding to.
- hellofunk 9y ago
  I can't tell if you were suggesting we should read the original article only, but not this response?
  - khazhou 9y ago
    Neither. I had a typo.
- vosper 9y ago
  I think Rich Hickey has an excellent point about the hurt that these kind of rants cause to people in the open source community. I can't imagine this guy would ever go up to Rich Hickey and yell "Fuck You" at him in person, but somehow he feels okay about doing it from behind a screen. To quote from the linked post: > And, if you are talking about Clojure, you are talking to me. The indirection doesn't mask the attack on people, their work and their choices. > I have to say now to those for whom such expressions are cathartic - they hurt people, a lot. I don't believe the sentiments in the post are widely held - most people who are happily using Clojure aren't as vocal. But it doesn't take many arrows to bring someone down. > Every time I have to process such a diatribe and its aftermath, and its effects on myself, my family, and my co-workers, I have to struggle back from "Why should I bother?", and every time it gets harder to justify to myself and my family that it's worth the time, energy and emotional burden. Every time a community engages with such a diatribe without calling it out, and decrying its tone, the civility of our discourse and treatment of others heads further down the drain. These are the people who're building the technology we're using, and if something is hurting them and making them not want to go on with their work then that IS bad for technology. You might not care either way for the debate, but no-one should tolerate the tone that the original author used.
  - zimablue 9y ago
    I actually disagree massively with this point. I love Rich Hickey's work, love Clojure but it's kind of an important principle that you have to be able to separate attacks on ideas or systems from attacks on people. If you identify yourself with an idea and I attack it, it's your responsibility to not take it personally and not a reason for me not to make a statement. If you can't do that, you can't have debate, or science. You can only have tribalism and identity politics.
    - hellofunk 9y ago
      If you read the additional comments in the original article, comments by the same author, you can see that Rich is directly addressing those when he identifies himself with the system.
    - WillPostForFood 9y ago
      I agree but only when the "attack" is within civil bounds, which the original blog post crossed(). Otherwise you create a situation where people can attack people while hiding behind the claim they are attacking idea. It doesn't help conversation to support saying Fuck Feminism, but I have no beef with Feminists. I believe the original post that Rich Hickey is responding to was more a misguided attempt at humor and being provocative than an actual serious attack.
      - eropple 9y ago
        > I believe the original post that Rich Hickey is responding to was more a misguided attempt at humor and being provocative than an actual serious attack. Really? It seemed very earnest--jerkish, but earnest--to me.
        WillPostForFood 9y ago
        Passages like this made me think the author's intent wasn't totally earnest, but going for melodramatic effect. Now that the party is over and sunrise begins to reveal the plastic fairy lights and overdone makeup, I begin to question my life as well as the values that I am looking for within it. And the opening was just shock value, or an emotional outburst, not that he hates and wants to move on. ...Fuck Clojure. There I've said it and God it feels good. More misguided than malicious, which is how I would interpret it if the intent was purely earnest.
sethev 9y ago
"Entitlement" really captures the post Rich is responding to. Objections to the existence of Arachne and spec? Who is Chris Zheng to tell people what to spend their time and money on? And he wants Datomic open sourced. Waaah.
- zcaudate 9y ago
  It's damn good rhetoric to label a post 'entitled' and trash the author as childish.
  - synthc 9y ago
    it deserved that label IMO
    - zcaudate 9y ago
      you are 'entitled' to that opinion.
  - sethev 9y ago
    It's not a label, it's a description. Based on his post, that Zhang guy believes that people shouldn't have donated to Arachne, for example, because he personally didn't think it was necessary. In other words, his personal opinion should have a special status => entitled.
moomin 9y ago
I've read the original article and, to be quite honest, couldn't actually determine what point it was trying to make. The action items seemed to have very little to do with the rest of the rant. I actually read the response first and the weird thing is: I couldn't really tell you what exactly the response is replying to. I feel like the whole thing is a huge amount of verbiage expressing frustration and broken motives but any actual solid facts mentioned are peripheral at best to what's being said. I could write multiple pages on how I fell out of love with Clojure but I doubt it would benefit anyone and it'd be a huge pain to do. Clojure is the product of a singular aesthetic, for better or worse.
- sethev 9y ago
  To me the original article read as an expression of frustration - the sort of feelings that are easy to understand but hurtful and frankly stupid to put out in public.
  - stuaxo 9y ago
    The comparison to a relationship with a girl out of your league really makes him come off as a bit of a twat straight off the bat.
    - zcaudate 9y ago
      oh man... meta-trolling is amazing.
- jasode 9y ago
  >, couldn't actually determine what point it was trying to make. In the poorly written Chris Zheng rant, there was a link to a more mature blog post by Eric Normand.[1] (It would have been better use of Rich Hickey's time to ignore CZ and respond to Eric, but alas.) In any case, CZ is upset that Cognitec drives the evolution of Clojure and its libraries more than the community outside of Cognitec. E.g. one of his frameworks he liked (Noir) was ignored while Cognitec pushed its own. Here's my question, what mainstream programming language community actually meets CZ's criteria that the outside community drives the language with equal or more power than the internal team? It's certainly not Golang (Rob Pike, Brad Fitzgerald, Ross Cox, etc), nor C# (A Heilsberg, et al), nor Clang (Apple devs). Yes, they have github repos but the pull requests from outsiders is not the same priority as the internal teams agenda. Which language & community actually meets CZ's ideal? [1] http://www.lispcast.com/cognitect-clojure http://www.lispcast.com/cognitect-clojure
hellofunk 9y ago
By the way, Clojurescript is one of the greatest tools I've ever experienced in the software industry. And it is maintained by a real smart guy that gets paid by Cognitect to work on it. Isn't this a case of Cognitect spending money to improve free tools for the world? Which is the opposite of the original article's accusations?
- bpicolo 9y ago
  Agreed - Clojurescript is a ton of fun on the frontend!
- saosebastiao 9y ago
  Maybe it has gotten better in the last year or so, but I’ve been extremely disappointed in a) the scope of semantics divergence between Clojure and clojurescript, and b) the performance of clojurescript for anything larger than toy examples. After reading a blog post about scalajs[0], I came away pretty convinced that battle would be uphill. It’s just too hard to replicate one dynamic language’s semantics in another dynamic language without embedding huge and slow runtimes along with it. [0] http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/FromfirstprinciplesWhyIbetonScalajs.html http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/FromfirstprinciplesWhyIbetonScal...
  - hellofunk 9y ago
    I don't know what problems you were having, but the performance has been extraordinary for the enterprise app that I work on (now 3 years old). In fact, the product would not even exist without the tools clojurescript brought to the table. I don't know what you mean when you say the semantics are different between the two versions of the language, they really have the same overall design and I feel like I'm working in the same language when I switch between them.
  - virtualwhys 9y ago
    Looks like you forgot to link to the Scala.js blog post. FWIW, as a Scala.js user the combination of Bucklescript + Reason ML looks pretty compelling: static types and lightning fast build times. Haven't used Clojurescript but I'd imagine the code-change-reload cycle is quite fast compared to Scala.js, which while absolutely excellent in many ways, suffers from the dog slow compiler that is scalac (Scala collections blowing up generated binary size is the other drawback that comes to mind).
falsedan 9y ago
I get that this is important to the Lisp crew, but is this at all relevant to the general audience of HN? What's the takeaway: avoid Closure because of one drama? Rich is right about everything? Copmuters are terrible?
- sneak 9y ago
  The first version of HN was written in a dialect of Lisp. I can think of no messageboard on the ‘net for which Lisp-related stuff is more topical.
  - falsedan 9y ago
    > I can think of no messageboard on the ‘net for which Lisp-related stuff is more topical. I acknowledge that in my OP. Do you think it is possible that there is a site more focussed on Lisp stuff than HN that you are simply unaware of?
    - hellofunk 9y ago
      That is irrelevant here and you are arguing out onto a tangent for no meaningful reason.
      - falsedan 9y ago
        Did you mean to respond to the reply to my post? I didn’t introduce this topic, and I’m trying to understand what about my OP caused the confusion which prompted the response.
        hellofunk 9y ago
        Yes, you introduced the idea that HN's readers wouldn't be interested in this. Then, you went off on a tangent about whether or not HN is the right site or best site for lisp stuff. It's just filling the site with noise when people engage in those kinds of empty remarks.
- 9y ago
SterlingHero 9y ago
The initial article and this rebuff are a lot to do about nothing.
kccqzy 9y ago
My favorite sentence from the response is this one: “The presumption that everything is or ought to be a community endeavor is severely broken.” Community is a broad word. It can mean a bunch of very smart people working in concert to produce something truly magnificent, or it can mean giving the keys to a bunch of clowns and watching them mess around and make fun of themselves. I really wonder this whenever I see some new-fangled open source project putting out a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md stating community is a top value. Look, you are primarily writing software not trying to foster a community. A community can be helpful to produce great software, but a community can also mean additional mental and emotional toll, and clowns introducing discussions with little merit.
- mshenfield 9y ago
  That sentence also struck a chord with me. The dictionary definition of community: > n. A group of people having common interests: the scientific community; the international business community. The "Clojure community" is a group of people having a common interest in Clojure. The sentence doesn't disparage the community, or discourage engaging with the community. Rich Hickey's 1000 word response makes the case, and is evidence itself, that he and other Clojure contributors care about the community. He is explaining that he will continue to design and develop the language as a Rich Hickey thing instead of a consensus or community driven process. > A true community respects the autonomy of its participants... the ultimate authority and stewardship of Clojure remains with me
  - zcaudate 9y ago
    There's a difference in the language and the ecosystem around the language.
mcguire 9y ago
The original article (which has been flag-killed) was pretty poor, but included this link in the comments: http://www.lispcast.com/cognitect-clojure http://www.lispcast.com/cognitect-clojure
mcguire 9y ago
After reading the original article and Hickey's response, I'm significantly less sympathetic to Hickey. Here's the question: would Rock Hickey be Rich Hickey without Clojure? Would Cogitech exist without Clojure? I understand both sides. I know the frustration of living with someone's arbitrary decisions. I also know the frustration of getting nothing but attacks from something I have worked hard to give away. But Hickey has a higher standard here. He's gotten a lot more from the community than he admits in his response. It reads like he wants sympathy for all he has missed ot given away because of his work on Clojure. That's not a good response.
- ledgerdev 9y ago
  Great comment. Cognitect, and it's ownership/dominance of the language, is one of the more unfortunate things to happen to clojure in it's evolution, and should serve as a learning point for future language creators. I wish Rich had been able to find/take a different path and developed more of a community with a "social contract" rather than keeping clojure a semi private project which users should be grateful for the ability to use. It would bring more participation from a wider community which would make the language and community far stronger in the long run. Recent interactions I've had with the ReasonML project are night and day different than clojure. At this point it feels like there needs to be a clojure like language (fixing some problems like startup time) that embraces more of a social contract with the community.
  - Naomarik 9y ago
    An unfortunate thing? That a project's own creator ensures the quality of its future? What I've realized as I grown older is that the majority of people are not worth my time. Loads of people will actively waste your time and talk about things without knowledge. If you listen to Rich speak in any of his presentations or interviews, it's pretty obvious he knows the same thing and his inner circle are extremely intelligent. If you want to progress you must eliminate the garbage and keep the most quality people you can around you. We now have like 5 main versions and variants of javascript that came out in the last few years that all look like complete rubbish (purely my opinion). There seems to be a new build tool coming up every 3 months. Everyone is making a library for things as basic as calling an API or padding a string. At one point not so long ago I was one of the programmers who needed said libraries to get work done. The code for clojure is open source. If anyone absolutely must use clojure they can do a better job than Cognitect just fork it. Or keep learning the new version of javascript that inevitably comes out every year.
Grue3 9y ago
Poor response. Basically "we're not actually evil, just trust me". Why should it be a question of trust? A programming language that is controlled by one for-profit organization is an obviously bad idea. And the last paragraph, where he suddenly goes straight for a personal attack is completely uncalled for. You, a rockstar creator of a language are in no position to personally insult your users. Never punch down. Of course Clojure zealots lapped it up.
zcaudate 9y ago
As the author of the 'diatribe', I'm concerned that a personal account of my experience with a programming language and my reasons that I'm lacking motivation to continue to program in that language has generated this type of response. Yes, it was personal. Yes, it hurts to be rejected. Yes, it's a part of life. I felt that Rich's response was fair. There is so much frustration and pain in the search for perfection. He has given his heart and soul to the language so of course it was expected. I'm really glad he still cares so much for the language. It's rare to see such a raw, passionate reply like that and I know that the language is in great hands.
fulafel 9y ago
A tangent, but I find it interesting that they don't make any money from Clojure conferences. There are a few hundred attendees paying 500 USD/EUR, and they organise several conferences per year. I guess paying a few people's salary is good too according to the motivations expressed in the text.
jhkim0227 9y ago
good

124 points by disaster01 9y ago

Hard to deny he has a good way with words! I can't speak for the author Rich is replying to, but I have seen many in the community comment on the opaqueness of Cognitect, even comparing it to Apple. That's not necessarily bad, but it does have the unfortunate effect of letting some people's imaginations run with negativity in their assumptions about a company's motivations. Even if Cognitect did make money on Clojure, not sure why that should be a source of frustration. It's quite an amazing language, people should have some reward for their contributions to the industry, right?

khazhou 9y ago

This kind of drama is not healthy for technology. Do yourself a favor and don't waste time reading this, nor the original article it's responding to.

hellofunk 9y ago
I can't tell if you were suggesting we should read the original article only, but not this response?
- khazhou 9y ago
  Neither. I had a typo.
vosper 9y ago
I think Rich Hickey has an excellent point about the hurt that these kind of rants cause to people in the open source community. I can't imagine this guy would ever go up to Rich Hickey and yell "Fuck You" at him in person, but somehow he feels okay about doing it from behind a screen. To quote from the linked post: > And, if you are talking about Clojure, you are talking to me. The indirection doesn't mask the attack on people, their work and their choices. > I have to say now to those for whom such expressions are cathartic - they hurt people, a lot. I don't believe the sentiments in the post are widely held - most people who are happily using Clojure aren't as vocal. But it doesn't take many arrows to bring someone down. > Every time I have to process such a diatribe and its aftermath, and its effects on myself, my family, and my co-workers, I have to struggle back from "Why should I bother?", and every time it gets harder to justify to myself and my family that it's worth the time, energy and emotional burden. Every time a community engages with such a diatribe without calling it out, and decrying its tone, the civility of our discourse and treatment of others heads further down the drain. These are the people who're building the technology we're using, and if something is hurting them and making them not want to go on with their work then that IS bad for technology. You might not care either way for the debate, but no-one should tolerate the tone that the original author used.
- zimablue 9y ago
  I actually disagree massively with this point. I love Rich Hickey's work, love Clojure but it's kind of an important principle that you have to be able to separate attacks on ideas or systems from attacks on people. If you identify yourself with an idea and I attack it, it's your responsibility to not take it personally and not a reason for me not to make a statement. If you can't do that, you can't have debate, or science. You can only have tribalism and identity politics.
  - hellofunk 9y ago
    If you read the additional comments in the original article, comments by the same author, you can see that Rich is directly addressing those when he identifies himself with the system.
  - WillPostForFood 9y ago
    I agree but only when the "attack" is within civil bounds, which the original blog post crossed(). Otherwise you create a situation where people can attack people while hiding behind the claim they are attacking idea. It doesn't help conversation to support saying Fuck Feminism, but I have no beef with Feminists. I believe the original post that Rich Hickey is responding to was more a misguided attempt at humor and being provocative than an actual serious attack.
    - eropple 9y ago
      > I believe the original post that Rich Hickey is responding to was more a misguided attempt at humor and being provocative than an actual serious attack. Really? It seemed very earnest--jerkish, but earnest--to me.
      - WillPostForFood 9y ago
        Passages like this made me think the author's intent wasn't totally earnest, but going for melodramatic effect. Now that the party is over and sunrise begins to reveal the plastic fairy lights and overdone makeup, I begin to question my life as well as the values that I am looking for within it. And the opening was just shock value, or an emotional outburst, not that he hates and wants to move on. ...Fuck Clojure. There I've said it and God it feels good. More misguided than malicious, which is how I would interpret it if the intent was purely earnest.

sethev 9y ago

"Entitlement" really captures the post Rich is responding to. Objections to the existence of Arachne and spec? Who is Chris Zheng to tell people what to spend their time and money on? And he wants Datomic open sourced. Waaah.

zcaudate 9y ago
It's damn good rhetoric to label a post 'entitled' and trash the author as childish.
- synthc 9y ago
  it deserved that label IMO
  - zcaudate 9y ago
    you are 'entitled' to that opinion.
- sethev 9y ago
  It's not a label, it's a description. Based on his post, that Zhang guy believes that people shouldn't have donated to Arachne, for example, because he personally didn't think it was necessary. In other words, his personal opinion should have a special status => entitled.

moomin 9y ago

I've read the original article and, to be quite honest, couldn't actually determine what point it was trying to make. The action items seemed to have very little to do with the rest of the rant. I actually read the response first and the weird thing is: I couldn't really tell you what exactly the response is replying to. I feel like the whole thing is a huge amount of verbiage expressing frustration and broken motives but any actual solid facts mentioned are peripheral at best to what's being said. I could write multiple pages on how I fell out of love with Clojure but I doubt it would benefit anyone and it'd be a huge pain to do. Clojure is the product of a singular aesthetic, for better or worse.

sethev 9y ago
To me the original article read as an expression of frustration - the sort of feelings that are easy to understand but hurtful and frankly stupid to put out in public.
- stuaxo 9y ago
  The comparison to a relationship with a girl out of your league really makes him come off as a bit of a twat straight off the bat.
  - zcaudate 9y ago
    oh man... meta-trolling is amazing.
jasode 9y ago
>, couldn't actually determine what point it was trying to make. In the poorly written Chris Zheng rant, there was a link to a more mature blog post by Eric Normand.[1] (It would have been better use of Rich Hickey's time to ignore CZ and respond to Eric, but alas.) In any case, CZ is upset that Cognitec drives the evolution of Clojure and its libraries more than the community outside of Cognitec. E.g. one of his frameworks he liked (Noir) was ignored while Cognitec pushed its own. Here's my question, what mainstream programming language community actually meets CZ's criteria that the outside community drives the language with equal or more power than the internal team? It's certainly not Golang (Rob Pike, Brad Fitzgerald, Ross Cox, etc), nor C# (A Heilsberg, et al), nor Clang (Apple devs). Yes, they have github repos but the pull requests from outsiders is not the same priority as the internal teams agenda. Which language & community actually meets CZ's ideal? [1] http://www.lispcast.com/cognitect-clojure http://www.lispcast.com/cognitect-clojure

hellofunk 9y ago

By the way, Clojurescript is one of the greatest tools I've ever experienced in the software industry. And it is maintained by a real smart guy that gets paid by Cognitect to work on it. Isn't this a case of Cognitect spending money to improve free tools for the world? Which is the opposite of the original article's accusations?

bpicolo 9y ago
Agreed - Clojurescript is a ton of fun on the frontend!
saosebastiao 9y ago
Maybe it has gotten better in the last year or so, but I’ve been extremely disappointed in a) the scope of semantics divergence between Clojure and clojurescript, and b) the performance of clojurescript for anything larger than toy examples. After reading a blog post about scalajs[0], I came away pretty convinced that battle would be uphill. It’s just too hard to replicate one dynamic language’s semantics in another dynamic language without embedding huge and slow runtimes along with it. [0] http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/FromfirstprinciplesWhyIbetonScalajs.html http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/FromfirstprinciplesWhyIbetonScal...
- hellofunk 9y ago
  I don't know what problems you were having, but the performance has been extraordinary for the enterprise app that I work on (now 3 years old). In fact, the product would not even exist without the tools clojurescript brought to the table. I don't know what you mean when you say the semantics are different between the two versions of the language, they really have the same overall design and I feel like I'm working in the same language when I switch between them.
- virtualwhys 9y ago
  Looks like you forgot to link to the Scala.js blog post. FWIW, as a Scala.js user the combination of Bucklescript + Reason ML looks pretty compelling: static types and lightning fast build times. Haven't used Clojurescript but I'd imagine the code-change-reload cycle is quite fast compared to Scala.js, which while absolutely excellent in many ways, suffers from the dog slow compiler that is scalac (Scala collections blowing up generated binary size is the other drawback that comes to mind).

falsedan 9y ago

I get that this is important to the Lisp crew, but is this at all relevant to the general audience of HN? What's the takeaway: avoid Closure because of one drama? Rich is right about everything? Copmuters are terrible?

sneak 9y ago
The first version of HN was written in a dialect of Lisp. I can think of no messageboard on the ‘net for which Lisp-related stuff is more topical.
- falsedan 9y ago
  > I can think of no messageboard on the ‘net for which Lisp-related stuff is more topical. I acknowledge that in my OP. Do you think it is possible that there is a site more focussed on Lisp stuff than HN that you are simply unaware of?
  - hellofunk 9y ago
    That is irrelevant here and you are arguing out onto a tangent for no meaningful reason.
    - falsedan 9y ago
      Did you mean to respond to the reply to my post? I didn’t introduce this topic, and I’m trying to understand what about my OP caused the confusion which prompted the response.
      - hellofunk 9y ago
        Yes, you introduced the idea that HN's readers wouldn't be interested in this. Then, you went off on a tangent about whether or not HN is the right site or best site for lisp stuff. It's just filling the site with noise when people engage in those kinds of empty remarks.
9y ago

SterlingHero 9y ago

The initial article and this rebuff are a lot to do about nothing.

kccqzy 9y ago

My favorite sentence from the response is this one: “The presumption that everything is or ought to be a community endeavor is severely broken.” Community is a broad word. It can mean a bunch of very smart people working in concert to produce something truly magnificent, or it can mean giving the keys to a bunch of clowns and watching them mess around and make fun of themselves. I really wonder this whenever I see some new-fangled open source project putting out a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md stating community is a top value. Look, you are primarily writing software not trying to foster a community. A community can be helpful to produce great software, but a community can also mean additional mental and emotional toll, and clowns introducing discussions with little merit.

mshenfield 9y ago
That sentence also struck a chord with me. The dictionary definition of community: > n. A group of people having common interests: the scientific community; the international business community. The "Clojure community" is a group of people having a common interest in Clojure. The sentence doesn't disparage the community, or discourage engaging with the community. Rich Hickey's 1000 word response makes the case, and is evidence itself, that he and other Clojure contributors care about the community. He is explaining that he will continue to design and develop the language as a Rich Hickey thing instead of a consensus or community driven process. > A true community respects the autonomy of its participants... the ultimate authority and stewardship of Clojure remains with me
- zcaudate 9y ago
  There's a difference in the language and the ecosystem around the language.

mcguire 9y ago

The original article (which has been flag-killed) was pretty poor, but included this link in the comments: http://www.lispcast.com/cognitect-clojure http://www.lispcast.com/cognitect-clojure

mcguire 9y ago

After reading the original article and Hickey's response, I'm significantly less sympathetic to Hickey. Here's the question: would Rock Hickey be Rich Hickey without Clojure? Would Cogitech exist without Clojure? I understand both sides. I know the frustration of living with someone's arbitrary decisions. I also know the frustration of getting nothing but attacks from something I have worked hard to give away. But Hickey has a higher standard here. He's gotten a lot more from the community than he admits in his response. It reads like he wants sympathy for all he has missed ot given away because of his work on Clojure. That's not a good response.

ledgerdev 9y ago
Great comment. Cognitect, and it's ownership/dominance of the language, is one of the more unfortunate things to happen to clojure in it's evolution, and should serve as a learning point for future language creators. I wish Rich had been able to find/take a different path and developed more of a community with a "social contract" rather than keeping clojure a semi private project which users should be grateful for the ability to use. It would bring more participation from a wider community which would make the language and community far stronger in the long run. Recent interactions I've had with the ReasonML project are night and day different than clojure. At this point it feels like there needs to be a clojure like language (fixing some problems like startup time) that embraces more of a social contract with the community.
- Naomarik 9y ago
  An unfortunate thing? That a project's own creator ensures the quality of its future? What I've realized as I grown older is that the majority of people are not worth my time. Loads of people will actively waste your time and talk about things without knowledge. If you listen to Rich speak in any of his presentations or interviews, it's pretty obvious he knows the same thing and his inner circle are extremely intelligent. If you want to progress you must eliminate the garbage and keep the most quality people you can around you. We now have like 5 main versions and variants of javascript that came out in the last few years that all look like complete rubbish (purely my opinion). There seems to be a new build tool coming up every 3 months. Everyone is making a library for things as basic as calling an API or padding a string. At one point not so long ago I was one of the programmers who needed said libraries to get work done. The code for clojure is open source. If anyone absolutely must use clojure they can do a better job than Cognitect just fork it. Or keep learning the new version of javascript that inevitably comes out every year.

Grue3 9y ago

Poor response. Basically "we're not actually evil, just trust me". Why should it be a question of trust? A programming language that is controlled by one for-profit organization is an obviously bad idea. And the last paragraph, where he suddenly goes straight for a personal attack is completely uncalled for. You, a rockstar creator of a language are in no position to personally insult your users. Never punch down. Of course Clojure zealots lapped it up.

zcaudate 9y ago

As the author of the 'diatribe', I'm concerned that a personal account of my experience with a programming language and my reasons that I'm lacking motivation to continue to program in that language has generated this type of response. Yes, it was personal. Yes, it hurts to be rejected. Yes, it's a part of life. I felt that Rich's response was fair. There is so much frustration and pain in the search for perfection. He has given his heart and soul to the language so of course it was expected. I'm really glad he still cares so much for the language. It's rare to see such a raw, passionate reply like that and I know that the language is in great hands.

fulafel 9y ago

A tangent, but I find it interesting that they don't make any money from Clojure conferences. There are a few hundred attendees paying 500 USD/EUR, and they organise several conferences per year. I guess paying a few people's salary is good too according to the motivations expressed in the text.

jhkim0227 9y ago

good