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Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits
- zerr 13y agoWhile I have much sympathy for Rich (way more than for Clojure), I find his talks to be extremely simple. He can talk hours about very basic and obvious things. Overall, at the end, I'm not getting much new from it.
- rpdillon 13y agoI think I'm prone to cascading realization more than most. I often watch (or read) things multiple times, each time seeing it in a new way. For me, it's not so much the process of getting a principle intellectually, but a long process of internalization, often of simple ideas, and putting them into practice in my everyday work. The colloquial term for this is 'stupid', I think, but I prefer to think of it in a more positive light. =) It actually makes me think of my favorite T.S. Eliot quote: 'We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.' I often return to basics and understand them in a new way after some time away, and Rich's talks evoke that phenomenon for me more than most.
- jacquesm 13y ago> Overall, at the end, I'm not getting much new from it. The trick here is to pretend for a bit that you're not yet as amazingly well educated and developed as you no doubt are and then to realize that there are a large number of people like that. As one of those I'm really happy he takes the time out to do these. To you it would obviously be a waste of time so no need to watch them, but I definitely get some value from them. I like that 'much' in there.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoWhat he talks about may be obvious to you, but is probably not the reality for 90% of the industry.
- mrspeaker 13y agoHe also has an excellent ability to make the complex and abstract seem simple and obvious. His talks are not bullet points of "how to program good" that you're supposed to check off as you code - they're deeper-but-general ideas that are supposed to simmer and percolate. All the smartest people I know (far smarter than me) are constantly impressed by his talks - and discussing with them often makes me realise I've missed some bigger-picture concepts. So my conclusion (in lieu of a chat over a beer with the person to dig deeper) is to assume that superficial dismissal of his talks mostly demonstrate a superficial understanding of the content.
- zerr 13y agoI think his talks [that I've watched] are more about the taste. So the fact that I mostly agree with him, i.e. have a similar taste, doesn't necessary correlate with a superficial understanding.
- deliminator 13y agoAlthough more on the motivational than in the technical side, I learned a lot from his talks. To me, the feeling after one of his talks is more akin to "it's is so obvious to me now, I should have been thinking like this all along". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus
- malkia 13y agoIt's because of him I know now the difference between simple and easy, that easy and that simple!
- KevinEldon 13y agoOh shit, I have learned a lot from Rich's talks... so your talks must be much more useful. Where can I find them? Please tell me you have some talks? You have such great ideas, or communicate such "extremely simple" ideas so well that others (or even you yourself) have recorded them for me to watch. No talks? So you keep this knowledge to yourself and shit all over a guy who shares his knowledge with a community? Your comment is terrible. You shit on Rich, you shit on Clojure, and say nothing other than you're so superior that you get nothing from anything Rich says. Fuck you (yes, that's not subtle, but your comment is passive-aggressive bullshit or perhaps you lack the ability to clearly state WHY you do not think a talk is useful).
- KevinEldon 13y agoI'm going to reply to myself to clarify my harsh words. It is very easy to say something sucks. Windows sucks. Linux sucks. Lisp sucks. Apple Sucks. Google Sucks. It doesn't mean anything to say it. It is not useful to say something sucks, you cannot fix "sucks". Saying what is wrong with something is useful. Saying Rich's talks are "simple" is something, except most people don't seem to agree, so it would be much more useful to cite the things you know beyond the "simple" things Rich has talked about... "Rich is ok, he says simple things, but read X, or watch Y" is useful. I may disagree with you but at least I have something to investigate. In a better mood this probably would have been my first post, but HN seems to be about shitting on stuff these days so I guess I just went with that.
- kriro 13y agoYour comments suck.
- KevinEldon 13y agoHave a blessed day.
- Sandman 13y agoI really wish this is the last time I see a comment like this on HN. This is nothing but an angry, sarcastic rant by somebody who, I can only presume, had a really bad day. There is absolutely nothing civil in this comment. While I completely disagree with the grandparent comment, I understand that that's his/her opinion, nothing more. What Hickey talks about may seem obvious, but only in hindsight, at least to me. It seems that most of the commenters in this thread feel the same way. However, I can accept that there are people, like Zerr, who would find Hickey's talks to be rather boring stuff, since they are already well aware of everything he talks about. So there's really no need to reply to these people with hateful comments like this one.
- mattjaynes 13y agoOne of my favorite quotes from Rich Hickey: "Simplicity is hard work. But, there's a huge payoff. The person who has a genuinely simpler system - a system made out of genuinely simple parts, is going to be able to affect the greatest change with the least work. He's going to kick your ass. He's gonna spend more time simplifying things up front and in the long haul he's gonna wipe the plate with you because he'll have that ability to change things when you're struggling to push elephants around." http://devopsu.com/blog/simplicity-is-key/ http://devopsu.com/blog/simplicity-is-key/
- tedunangst 13y agoFun nit: this is one of the times when effect is the correct word to use.
- derleth 13y agoDepends on the variety of English. What you said is true for the prestige dialect, certainly.
- derleth 13y agoDownvoting linguistic knowledge doesn't make it any less true.
- mtinkerhess 13y agoI'd be curious to see an example of a dialect in which "to affect change" is more correct than "to effect change"?
- tedunangst 13y agoSome people seem to like pushing descriptivism too far. "Somebody said it, therefore it's correct."
- 13y ago
- jacquesm 13y agoSimple made easy has my vote for the #1 spot, it isn't about clojure as much as about general principles. I really love that talk.
- grayrest 13y agoI'll also vote Simple Made Easy above Are We There Yet. I've talked about it at length with a bunch of other programmers and get consistently better responses from starting people with Simple Made Easy.
- mercer 13y agoIf this is the talk I think it is, I can say it helped me greatly as a programmer. I'm one of those 'homegrown' programmers with no formal education, and I'd probably horrify some of you with my work. But I'm learning, and very aware of my deficiencies. What I loved about this talk is that it seemed more a 'philosophy of programming' thing, where a lot of what he said applied even to my shitty programming, and (hopefully) even improved it.
- jacquesm 13y agoFor me the biggest change was 'structured programming', Niklaus Wirth and K&R changed the way I looked at code completely. Pascal was never my favorite language but after 'Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs' I became a much better programmer pretty much overnight.
- mercer 13y agoHaha, yeah, that's pretty much the single most useful thing I learned.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoRich Hickey has great track record of being spot on. He seems to know exactly where the pain points of software engineering are, and proposes sound solutions. In this talk he explains how Datomic works, but more importantly, what the reasoning behind it is: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/hickey-datomic-cap http://www.infoq.com/interviews/hickey-datomic-cap Everybody should watch this, as the concepts behind it apply to any system.
- twic 13y agoWe sometimes watch Rich Hickey's talks in the office. We always have a good conversation afterwards.
- twopoint718 13y agoThat's exactly what I've started doing at my office. We watch a talk per week and discuss it after. Rich Hickey occupies several rows of the spreadsheet!
- hadem 13y agoIs your spreadsheet of talks publicly available?
- twopoint718 13y agoI could make it that way, it's still pretty small at the moment. Here's the current list: Theraputic refactoring - Katrina Owen, The Future of Programming - Bret Victor, Simplicity matters -Rich Hickey, Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey, Programming with nothing - Tom Stuart, Connections: Faith in Numbers - James Burke, Growing a Language - Guy Steele, Y Not - Adventures in Functional Programming - Jim Weirich, Cool Code - Kevlin Henney, We Really Don't Know How to Compute! - Gerald Jay Sussman, Keynote: Architecture the Lost Years - Bob Martin, Computer Heuristics - Richard Feynman, The Power of Abstraction - Barbara Liskov, The Mother of All Demos - Douglas Engelbart
- jwr 13y agoThis is a great list, now I can refer my new programmers to a single place. Rich is quite possibly the greatest marketing asset for the Clojure programming language. After listening to one of his talks (about concurrency) I realized that there is an extremely smart person that does a lot of thinking and makes a lot of sense, so perhaps Clojure might be worth a try. Haven't regretted it.
- erichmond 13y agoI took the same path. I was actually a bit skeptical at his talks initially, but once they sunk in, he's really head of the curve on this stuff.
- talles 13y agoI love this guy since the first time I watched 'Are We There Yet?'.
- wicknicks 13y agoRich Hickey is a genius. I love how he connected music to software engineering [1]. He should write a book on some of these topics. He has a lot more than 45 mins talks to offer to the world. [1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Performance http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Perfor...
- kriro 13y agoI've been waiting for a book that elaborates on simple design a la Hickey (with some examples/code) ever since I saw the "simple made easy" talk. If there is one that I missed, I'd love to know.
- larve 13y agoparadigms of artificial intelligence by norvig, although seemingly about something completely different, has the same "simplicity" in its code.
- jorgeleo 13y agoI read the list of comments and I find disappointing too see people saying things like "he talk simple stuff", or "this is too basic, I got nothing out of it" I love those talks, and every once in a while I watch them again so I don't forget the basic principles. Rich went 2 step ahead than simple state what some people feels as obvious: he created a language that implements them, and he communicated those concepts. He did something to better the trade. Have you? This is not about the next tool to make a quick buck, or cute, but impractical, philosophical concepts And, I too would put "Simple made easy" as the first one. Then it becomes much easier to understand why functions are the 555 chip of software development.
- dgellow 13y agoIs there a way to get transcriptions from infoq presentations ?
- Elrac 13y agoI often wish there was, too. I _hate_ being forced to watch the video to assimilate what a person has to say. At work, it's not an option for me.