5 ms·

Yeah I heard him say that and to be perfectly honest I don't know if I believe he truly thinks that. This is a man who devoted years of his life to create a new

Yeah I heard him say that and to be perfectly honest I don't know if I believe he truly thinks that. This is a man who devoted years of his life to create a new programming language because he found it difficult and frustrating to use existing languages. In this talk and many others he talks about how he believes Clojure's features (like dynamic typing and dynamic dispatch and the whole keyword system and others) are really key to writing good software and how many other features (like static typing) are irrelevant or harmful... and now here he's saying programming languages don't matter much?

Scarbutt 9y ago
He mentioned he liked Common Lisp but they didn't let him use it in production, so he created a Lisp that runs on an industrial runtime.
- mikebenfield 9y ago
  Yeah, I understand that. But if he really didn't care much about programming languages, why wouldn't he just use C++, which he was allowed to use in production?
  - Scarbutt 9y ago
    He talks about that quite a few times in the video.
    - mikebenfield 9y ago
      Yes, and the things he says about it indicate he does think programming languages are important.
      - grzm 9y ago
        I think there may be a bit of people talking past each other here. I think one can reasonably say that which language one uses isn't as important as which features that language has. Also, there comment you originally responded says "that programming languages (including his own) are the most important aspect of doing our programming work well." That doesn't mean that the language or its features aren't important. They're saying that it's not the most important thing. The hierarchy Rich refers to[0] puts domain complexity and misconception as 10× more important than anything that's language specific. I believe this is the basis of the quote I pulled. I think this is compatible with thinking that language features are important, but domain complexity and misconception are more important issues when tackling a problem with code. [0]: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/EffectivePrograms/00.27.19.png https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
  - jb1991 9y ago
    Rich was a professor of an advanced C++ class (at NYU, I think) in the late 90s, and wrote a very popular paper on how to get some killer performance out of that language. He's been around the block and knows a thing or two about these things.
    - mikebenfield 9y ago
      I don't understand how this is a reply to my comment.
- zeveb 9y ago
  Which is a little weird, because (as I mention elsewhere), there's Armed Bear Common Lisp, which is a Lisp which runs on the JVM. Seems to me that he could have saved a lot of time an effort just sticking with Common Lisp. He'll argue, of course, that the time & effort are worth it for immutable data structures. I'm unconvinced, but that's the great thing: we don't all have to agree! I'm glad he's having fun.
  - joe-user 9y ago
    Immutable data structures were part of it, but not the whole story. From the article: "But Lisp had a bunch of things that needed to be fixed in my opinion. It was built on concretions, you know, a lot of the design of more abstractions and CLOS and stuff like that came after the underpinnings. The underpinnings didn't take advantage of them so if you want polymorphism at the bottom, you have to retrofit it. If you want immutability at the core, you just need to, you need something different to, you know, from the ground up. And that's why Clojure was worth doing as opposed to trying to do Clojure as a library for Common Lisp. The Lisps were functional kind of, mostly by convention. But the other data structures were not, you had to switch gears to go from, you know, assoc with lists to, you know, a proper hash table. And lists are crappy data structures, sorry, they just are. They're very weak, and there's no reason to use them as a fundamental primitive for programming. Also packages and interning were very complex there."
wellpast 9y ago
But notice that his arguments are always focused on the tool/feature. You can look at Clojure as a "reference implementation" for many of Hickey's ideas. (A production-ready reference implementation, of course.) But all of Rich's ideas/"features" can be applied in your language of choice. (Immutability, functional programming, avoid-ADTs, how one should do versioing, etc.) I've employed many of these and other of Rich's ideas effectively in Java. The ergonomics would be better in Clojure, of course, but for (probably good) political reasons I have to use Java at work. Just notice that Rich's rhetoric is nearly always focused on specific problems and solutions that transcend Clojure.
- jballanc 9y ago
  > But all of Rich's ideas/"features" can be applied in your language of choice. Not just can, but have been and are. Clojure is one of those languages (like SmallTalk) where, even if it's not the most "successful" or "popular" language in the long run, it has had an oversized impact on how we program in general.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - rufugee 9y ago
    Genuinely curious...what are these over-sized impacts?
    - kimi 9y ago
      Immutable data structures?
      - bjoli 9y ago
        Like... Singly linked lists? I even remember using VLists (work by Philip Bagwell, that probably inspired the data structures in clojure) in 2006, and I am not even a programmer.

Scarbutt 9y ago

He mentioned he liked Common Lisp but they didn't let him use it in production, so he created a Lisp that runs on an industrial runtime.

mikebenfield 9y ago
Yeah, I understand that. But if he really didn't care much about programming languages, why wouldn't he just use C++, which he was allowed to use in production?
- Scarbutt 9y ago
  He talks about that quite a few times in the video.
  - mikebenfield 9y ago
    Yes, and the things he says about it indicate he does think programming languages are important.
    - grzm 9y ago
      I think there may be a bit of people talking past each other here. I think one can reasonably say that which language one uses isn't as important as which features that language has. Also, there comment you originally responded says "that programming languages (including his own) are the most important aspect of doing our programming work well." That doesn't mean that the language or its features aren't important. They're saying that it's not the most important thing. The hierarchy Rich refers to[0] puts domain complexity and misconception as 10× more important than anything that's language specific. I believe this is the basis of the quote I pulled. I think this is compatible with thinking that language features are important, but domain complexity and misconception are more important issues when tackling a problem with code. [0]: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/EffectivePrograms/00.27.19.png https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
- jb1991 9y ago
  Rich was a professor of an advanced C++ class (at NYU, I think) in the late 90s, and wrote a very popular paper on how to get some killer performance out of that language. He's been around the block and knows a thing or two about these things.
  - mikebenfield 9y ago
    I don't understand how this is a reply to my comment.
zeveb 9y ago
Which is a little weird, because (as I mention elsewhere), there's Armed Bear Common Lisp, which is a Lisp which runs on the JVM. Seems to me that he could have saved a lot of time an effort just sticking with Common Lisp. He'll argue, of course, that the time & effort are worth it for immutable data structures. I'm unconvinced, but that's the great thing: we don't all have to agree! I'm glad he's having fun.
- joe-user 9y ago
  Immutable data structures were part of it, but not the whole story. From the article: "But Lisp had a bunch of things that needed to be fixed in my opinion. It was built on concretions, you know, a lot of the design of more abstractions and CLOS and stuff like that came after the underpinnings. The underpinnings didn't take advantage of them so if you want polymorphism at the bottom, you have to retrofit it. If you want immutability at the core, you just need to, you need something different to, you know, from the ground up. And that's why Clojure was worth doing as opposed to trying to do Clojure as a library for Common Lisp. The Lisps were functional kind of, mostly by convention. But the other data structures were not, you had to switch gears to go from, you know, assoc with lists to, you know, a proper hash table. And lists are crappy data structures, sorry, they just are. They're very weak, and there's no reason to use them as a fundamental primitive for programming. Also packages and interning were very complex there."

wellpast 9y ago

But notice that his arguments are always focused on the tool/feature. You can look at Clojure as a "reference implementation" for many of Hickey's ideas. (A production-ready reference implementation, of course.) But all of Rich's ideas/"features" can be applied in your language of choice. (Immutability, functional programming, avoid-ADTs, how one should do versioing, etc.) I've employed many of these and other of Rich's ideas effectively in Java. The ergonomics would be better in Clojure, of course, but for (probably good) political reasons I have to use Java at work. Just notice that Rich's rhetoric is nearly always focused on specific problems and solutions that transcend Clojure.

jballanc 9y ago
> But all of Rich's ideas/"features" can be applied in your language of choice. Not just can, but have been and are. Clojure is one of those languages (like SmallTalk) where, even if it's not the most "successful" or "popular" language in the long run, it has had an oversized impact on how we program in general.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rufugee 9y ago
  Genuinely curious...what are these over-sized impacts?
  - kimi 9y ago
    Immutable data structures?
    - bjoli 9y ago
      Like... Singly linked lists? I even remember using VLists (work by Philip Bagwell, that probably inspired the data structures in clojure) in 2006, and I am not even a programmer.