Never used Lisp, but huge Clojure user, the real innovation is the immutable data structures: RICH HICKEY: Ok, so, problem number one on that list was place or

Never used Lisp, but huge Clojure user, the real innovation is the immutable data structures: RICH HICKEY: Ok, so, problem number one on that list was place oriented programming. Absolutely, this is the problem. Almost all the programs I wrote, lots of the things on that list were multi-threaded programs, you know, they're crazy hard in C++. Just impossible to get right, when you adopt a normal mutability approach, you know, mutable objects. So, this is the number one self-inflicted programming problem. It seemed, you know, clear to me that the answer was to make functional programming and immutable data the default idiom. So the challenge I had was, were there data structures that would be fast enough to say, "we could swap this for that". And the objective I had, the goal I had was to get within 2x for reads and 4x for writes. And I did a lot of work on this, this was actually the main research work behind Clojure, was about these persistent data structures. Eventually I found...you know I looked at Okasaki's stuff and, you know, the fully functional approach and none of that gets here. And then I found Bagwell's structures were not persistent, but I realized could be made so, and they just have tremendously great characteristics combining the persistence with the way they're laid out, the way memory works. They made it. They made this bar, and I was able to get my friend to try my programming language. You know, we (?) have large library of pure functions to support this, and, you know, immutable local bindings. Basically if you fall into Clojure, your first hurdle is not the parentheses, right? It's this, this functional paradigm, everything is gone, there's no mutable variables, there's no state, there's no mutable collections and everything else, but there's a lot of support, there's a big library. You just have to, you know, sort of learn the idioms. So I think this was straight-forward, the critical thing that's different about Clojure is, by the time I was doing Clojure, the people who invented this stuff had adopted a lot more, right? I think most of the adherents in the functional programming community considered functional programming to be about typed functional programming, statically typed functional programming is functional programming. And I don't think so, I think that this is, you know, this falls clearly in the 80/20 rule. And I think the split here is more like 99/1. The value props are all on this side, and I think Clojure users get a sense of that, they get a feel for that. This is the thing that makes you sleep at night. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/EffectivePrograms.md https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...