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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?”

#41

Post by ledgerdev »

mcguire wrote: post #36

After reading the original article and Hickey's response, I'm significantly less sympathetic to Hickey. Here's the question: would Rock Hickey be Rich Hickey without Clojure? Would Cogitech exist without Clojure? I understand both sides. I know the frustration of living with someone's arbitrary decisions. I also know the frustration of getting nothing but attacks from something I have worked hard to give away. But Hi…

Great comment. Cognitect, and it's ownership/dominance of the language, is one of the more unfortunate things to happen to clojure in it's evolution, and should serve as a learning point for future language creators.

I wish Rich had been able to find/take a different path and developed more of a community with a "social contract" rather than keeping clojure a semi private project which users should be grateful for the ability to use. It would bring more participation from a wider community which would make the language and community far stronger in the long run.

Recent interactions I've had with the ReasonML project are night and day different than clojure.

At this point it feels like there needs to be a clojure like language (fixing some problems like startup time) that embraces more of a social contract with the community.

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

#42

Post by girvo »

fourthark wrote: post #30
jasode wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, 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…

Though Node is run that way mainly because the pressure of io.js — specifically forked because Node wasn’t being run in a collaborative manner. Was an interesting time, with an excellent outcome.

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

#43

Post by girvo »

abiox wrote: post #18
zimablue wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually disagree massively with this point. I love Rich Hickey's work, love Clojure but it's kind of an important principle that you have to be able to separate attacks on ideas or systems from attacks on people. If you identify yourself with an idea and I attack it, it's your responsibility to not take it personally and not a reason for me not to make a statement. If you can't do that, you can't have debate, or s…

> it's your responsibility is it? solely? so-called "debate" is a two way street, right? sometimes "attacks" are sloppy and vicious, and it's a bit entitled to expect other people to pick apart your messaging to glean the signal in the noise. as humans, communication is a physiological process. pretending it's cold machinery rarely ends well.

Right, I agree with you re. Two-way streets, but Hickeys comment literally states that any attack on Clojure is an attack on himself, which I don’t think is fair under the same standard you’re saying should apply... does that make sense? I don’t know if I’m explaining it right.

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

#44

Post by Naomarik »

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…

Your claims are baseless. If there are any semantic differences between clojure and clojurescript they are so minute that I'm not aware of them. I'm a full stack developer and use both daily. There are no performance issues inherent with using clojurescript either. I say this having made a non trivial UI and pushing loads of data through it and seeing what everyone else has made. Check out precursor app.

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

#45

Post by Naomarik »

ledgerdev wrote: post #41
mcguire wrote: post #36

After reading the original article and Hickey's response, I'm significantly less sympathetic to Hickey. Here's the question: would Rock Hickey be Rich Hickey without Clojure? Would Cogitech exist without Clojure? I understand both sides. I know the frustration of living with someone's arbitrary decisions. I also know the frustration of getting nothing but attacks from something I have worked hard to give away. But Hi…

Great comment. Cognitect, and it's ownership/dominance of the language, is one of the more unfortunate things to happen to clojure in it's evolution, and should serve as a learning point for future language creators. I wish Rich had been able to find/take a different path and developed more of a community with a "social contract" rather than keeping clojure a semi private project which users should be grateful for th…

An unfortunate thing? That a project's own creator ensures the quality of its future?

What I've realized as I grown older is that the majority of people are not worth my time. Loads of people will actively waste your time and talk about things without knowledge. If you listen to Rich speak in any of his presentations or interviews, it's pretty obvious he knows the same thing and his inner circle are extremely intelligent. If you want to progress you must eliminate the garbage and keep the most quality people you can around you.

We now have like 5 main versions and variants of javascript that came out in the last few years that all look like complete rubbish (purely my opinion). There seems to be a new build tool coming up every 3 months. Everyone is making a library for things as basic as calling an API or padding a string. At one point not so long ago I was one of the programmers who needed said libraries to get work done.

The code for clojure is open source. If anyone absolutely must use clojure they can do a better job than Cognitect just fork it. Or keep learning the new version of javascript that inevitably comes out every year.

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

#46

Post by mshenfield »

kccqzy wrote: post #24

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 so…

That sentence also struck a chord with me.

The dictionary definition of community:

> n. A group of people having common interests: the scientific community; the international business community.

The "Clojure community" is a group of people having a common interest in Clojure.

The sentence doesn't disparage the community, or discourage engaging with the community. Rich Hickey's 1000 word response makes the case, and is evidence itself, that he and other Clojure contributors care about the community. He is explaining that he will continue to design and develop the language as a Rich Hickey thing instead of a consensus or community driven process.

> A true community respects the autonomy of its participants... the ultimate authority and stewardship of Clojure remains with me

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

#47

Post by darksaints »

Naomarik wrote: post #44
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…

Your claims are baseless. If there are any semantic differences between clojure and clojurescript they are so minute that I'm not aware of them. I'm a full stack developer and use both daily. There are no performance issues inherent with using clojurescript either. I say this having made a non trivial UI and pushing loads of data through it and seeing what everyone else has made. Check out precursor app.

There is a significant amount of divergence in semantics. I’m not sure why you would try to convince anyone otherwise...the clojurescript developers acknowledge this completely upfront.

https://clojurescript.org/about/differences

In my experience, all of the stated benefits of clojurescript become more and more tenuous as your intensity of use increases. Hello world seems fantastic, todomvc still seems pretty cool, but by the time you’re doing full size apps of meaningful complexity, you really start to see the limitations. In order to get any meaningful performance out of it, I ended up having to rewrite and experiment like crazy...the code looked like nothing I would have written in Clojure, using completely different idioms and data structures. And while the prototyping was fast, in the end it took me far longer to write and then iteratively optimize than it would have to write an equivalently fast version in scalajs or typescript. Maybe your experience is different, but my experience is my experience, and it most definitely is not baseless.

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

#48

Post by Naomarik »

darksaints wrote: post #47
Naomarik wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your claims are baseless. If there are any semantic differences between clojure and clojurescript they are so minute that I'm not aware of them. I'm a full stack developer and use both daily. There are no performance issues inherent with using clojurescript either. I say this having made a non trivial UI and pushing loads of data through it and seeing what everyone else has made. Check out precursor app.

There is a significant amount of divergence in semantics. I’m not sure why you would try to convince anyone otherwise...the clojurescript developers acknowledge this completely upfront. https://clojurescript.org/about/differences In my experience, all of the stated benefits of clojurescript become more and more tenuous as your intensity of use increases. Hello world seems fantastic, todomvc still seems pretty cool, b…

I've never had to make a context switch between clojure and clojurescript. If differences in semantics means I have to change how I think about solving the problem at hand, then that has been pretty much non existent in my experience. Of course with one you have browser APIs and the other is java, but when it comes to building up and transforming datastructures everything I've been doing works the same on both.

This is also why most the time you can just tack on a "c" on the extension and you have something that works on both clojure and clojurescript.

Performance is not an inherent problem of clojurescript. It was just the way you coded you prototyped your app. Your experience is valid but don't blame the problem on the tool when it was the way you solved your problem before you optimized it.

I absolutely mean no disrespect to you but I don't want your comment to dissuade others from trying out what has essentially been a utopia for me. It has allowed me to build non trivial webapps without having any familiarity with functional programming or lisp. The feedback loop is so damn tight that I was productive without knowing much of anything.

But maybe that's okay. If the everyone else is constantly updating their build tools to every flavor of the month and having to learn new versions of javascript, that gives the few of us who are mastering clojure/script a bit of an advantage.

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

#49

Post by Grue3 »

Poor response. Basically "we're not actually evil, just trust me". Why should it be a question of trust? A programming language that is controlled by one for-profit organization is an obviously bad idea. And the last paragraph, where he suddenly goes straight for a personal attack is completely uncalled for. You, a rockstar creator of a language are in no position to personally insult your users. Never punch down.

Of course Clojure zealots lapped it up.

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

#50

Post by falsedan »

hellofunk wrote: post #22
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.

Oh shit, they are too
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