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

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

#21

Post by hellofunk »

saosebastiao wrote: post #19
hellofunk wrote: post #9

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?

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…

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.

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

#22

Post by hellofunk »

falsedan wrote: post #14

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?

Why wouldn't HN readers care about lisp news?

Btw Closure and Clojure are two different things.

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

#23

Post by jasode »

moomin wrote: post #7

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 motive…

>, 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

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

#24

Post by kccqzy »

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.

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

#25

Post by virtualwhys »

saosebastiao wrote: post #19
hellofunk wrote: post #9

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?

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…

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).

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

#26

Post by saosebastiao »

virtualwhys wrote: post #25
saosebastiao wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Sorry abou that, just added it.

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

#27

Post by nextos »

moomin wrote: post #7

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 motive…

The original article doesn't make much sense to me either. It's just a weird rant.

I love Clojure and many of its libraries, but I think there are some aspects inhibiting its growth. Here they cover a few of these aspects:

http://www.lispcast.com/cognitect-clojure

It worries me a bit, since I would really like to have a practical Lisp that is on par with other mainstream languages in terms of tools, libraries and community. Clojure is quite healthy now, but some items need to be addressed in order not to fall behind.

I'm also quite enthusiastic about Racket getting to run on top of Chez Scheme, which may give it a bit of momentum. Besides, Clasp, with its LLVM capabilities, is the most promising Common Lisp to me right now. Sadly, it's mostly one-man project and the whole Common Lisp scene is a bit stagnant.

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

#28

Post by khazhou »

hellofunk wrote: post #4
khazhou wrote: post #3

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.

I can't tell if you were suggesting we should read the original article only, but not this response?

Neither. I had a typo.

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

#29

Post by jeremyjh »

jasode wrote: post #23
moomin wrote: post #7

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 motive…

>, 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 fr…

Ruby is an example for sure, Haskell is another.

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

#30

Post by fourthark »

jasode wrote: post #23
moomin wrote: post #7

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 motive…

>, 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 fr…

And they rejected a couple of his pull requests and implemented similar features themselves.

I don't think it's necessarily the responsibility of a project to validate its users. But there are examples like Node where the emphasis is on retaining and involving contributors.

https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/healthy-open-sourc...

I'm not sure it fits everywhere but based on later posts, it seems to be working for them.

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