4 ms·

Rich Hickey's talks inspired me to explore Clojure and functional programming in college. That led to a part of my career where I got to help advance an FP lang

Rich Hickey's talks inspired me to explore Clojure and functional programming in college. That led to a part of my career where I got to help advance an FP language (F#). Can't say it was a raging success, but it wasn't a raging failure either. Really happy things worked out the way they did, though. I still look back at my senior project, written in Clojure, from time to time and find it elegant in a unique way.

neoncontrails 3y ago
My experience was similar. I've built far more impactful things since then, but at the end of the day, the software that I'm most proud of was a calculator, of all things, that I made in Clojurescript. It was loosely based on the final chapter of SICP, and implemented an hilariously metacircular approach to transitioning the state of the register machine. Since the implementation was way more interesting than the actual application, I used Processing to visualize the register machine as if it were a rudimentary ALU (which it basically was). If it hadn't been for Rich Hickey, or Clojure, I'm not sure I'd have the slightest inkling of how joyful and creative it can be to write software. It was an A+ experience, even if I'd be swiftly fired for trying to push logic like that into production.
- waffletower 3y ago
  I pushed another build of a Clojure service into production a few minutes ago. There are companies that use it as a primary language you know :)
  - pluijzer 3y ago
    Second that and just to add, working fulltime with Clojure, apart from all the features and practical aspect is, really enjoyable.
owenm 3y ago
FWIW, I started programming F# during your tenure at MS and in a couple of years it became a really capable cross platform option - partly MS, partly community, but definitely helped out by you. Thanks!

4 ms·

Rich Hickey's talks inspired me to explore Clojure and functional programming in college. That led to a part of my career where I got to help advance an FP lang

by phillipcarter 3y ago

neoncontrails 3y ago
My experience was similar. I've built far more impactful things since then, but at the end of the day, the software that I'm most proud of was a calculator, of all things, that I made in Clojurescript. It was loosely based on the final chapter of SICP, and implemented an hilariously metacircular approach to transitioning the state of the register machine. Since the implementation was way more interesting than the actual application, I used Processing to visualize the register machine as if it were a rudimentary ALU (which it basically was). If it hadn't been for Rich Hickey, or Clojure, I'm not sure I'd have the slightest inkling of how joyful and creative it can be to write software. It was an A+ experience, even if I'd be swiftly fired for trying to push logic like that into production.
- waffletower 3y ago
  I pushed another build of a Clojure service into production a few minutes ago. There are companies that use it as a primary language you know :)
  - pluijzer 3y ago
    Second that and just to add, working fulltime with Clojure, apart from all the features and practical aspect is, really enjoyable.
owenm 3y ago
FWIW, I started programming F# during your tenure at MS and in a couple of years it became a really capable cross platform option - partly MS, partly community, but definitely helped out by you. Thanks!