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(next Rich)

clojure.org

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121–130 of 158 posts

Re: (next Rich)

#121

Post by aag »

Congratulations to Rich. Thank you for your immense contributions, especially in code, in software design, and in inspirational and thoughtful public speaking.

I attended your presentation on Clojure at the International Lisp Conference at MIT in 2009, where we were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Lisp. After your talk, you were surrounded by admiring Lispers, including several of the elder statesmen of the community. These were people who, to put it mildly, were not known for being quick with praise. But one after another, they were saying things like "This is the future of Lisp!"

By the way, I love the title. It reminds me of what I wrote when I started my last job:

  (call-with-current-continuation employer)

Re: (next Rich)

#122

Post by loumf »

cmiles74 wrote: post #115

Rich presented Clojure to our local software development group in 2008, I've been working with Clojure (both as a hobbyist and eventually professionally) ever since. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGVqrGmwOAw At that time I had been working with Java for years, both the conciseness of the code and the interactivity were flat-out amazing to me. It's saved me time and made me 100 times more productive. Congratulations…

What a great event —- we were lucky to get in on clojure when it was just getting started, and he was looking for places to promote it.

I reached out to him to come to our meeting because I met him when I took his Advanced C++ class at NYU continuing education in the 90’s. The class culminated in some advanced usage of his C++ functor library.

http://www.tutok.sk/fastgl/callback.html

Re: (next Rich)

#123

Post by tmountain »

Congratulations Rich! Your talks are a wellspring of inspiration, and I consider you a software “hero” (the good guys vs the locking concurrency monster).

I’ve been enjoying the fruits of your labors for more than a decade, and I have since introduced my daughter (a budding computer science student) to “simple made easy” and a bunch of your other talks.

Thanks for everything you’ve contributed to the software world. It’s a happier place to be as a result of your efforts.

Enjoy your retirement!

Re: (next Rich)

#124

Post by munro »

frou_dh wrote: post #24
munro wrote: post #20

Amazing news. I saw a video cast of Rick during a meeting @ NuBank, and it looked like corporate life had sucked the life out of him [1]. So, I'm glad he got out of there, and I hope he's able to shake it off like a bad dream. Building something like Clojure require radical thinking, and creative freedom. I can only imagine how trying to fit that into your weekly scrum sprint would be draining. And in the monthly mee…

Maybe you're just used to seeing him in "on" mode (giving legendary conference presentations) and he's more subdued when doing everyday work. It's a bit distasteful to virtually follow him around and speculate about his mental health.

Observing a public figure and expressing concern that their workplace doesn't align with their passions isn't prying into their personal life, or speculating about their mental health. What I'm saying is: NuBank is where hopes and dreams go to die, and corporate life more generally. It's not about being "on" or "off" but about being in an environment one can thrive.

Re: (next Rich)

#125

Post by shriphani »

Thank you very much for your work Rich. I've seen your talks in person a couple of times and really admired the immense clarity of thought in every one of your ideas. And thank you very much for giving us Clojure - lots of fun memories.

Re: (next Rich)

#126

Post by michaelsbradley »

tru1ock wrote: post #98

Simple made easy is the most impactful talk I have watched. Made a very big impact and I still think of it frequently. I never got into clojure but I am so glad it is around.

I feel the same. I was there in the room when he gave the talk: it was the first software-devs conference I'd attended and I was so green that I struggled to understand if he was making references to Haskell or another lang I'd been introduced to in the conference's previous days by various presenters.

Some days later I started learning Emacs, Clojure, et al. and I was/am definitely the better for it.

Re: (next Rich)

#127

Post by zbobet2012 »

Rich's simple made easy is the best programming video I've ever seen, and is ultimately I think what so many engineers need to "grok" to unlock better coding. I'm the "most senior" engineer (chief architect) in a company of more than a thousand engineers, and I recommend it to every junior who asks how to get better.

I will also say I used clojure + aleph to write the only significant application I ever released which never had a reported bug or outage. It ran for seven years and that application was under constant heavy load (more than 10k TPS).

Re: (next Rich)

#128

Post by vodkaPong »

Thanks for sharing your ideas with all of us Rich. I've only dabbled in Clojure but like many others I've found the language and your talks and ideas inspirational and exciting. A rare example of successfully simplifying things, referring to your deservedly famous talk.

Re: (next Rich)

#129

Post by notduncansmith »

magicinky wrote: post #100
brundolf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, very fitting way to put it :)

Agree. For those not familiar with Rich's famous use of etymology, see his 2011 presentation "Simple made Easy" as a good example: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ Side question: Rich seems to use etymology as a tool for original thinking and clear explanations. Are there other people who do this as well as he does?

I’ve always been fascinated with language, and long had a hobby of looking up etymologies (my high school Latin teacher was great at pointing these out in class), but Rich’s style definitely pushed me to use it as a tool for thinking. Naming things is (famously) hard, but a strong command of language (and willingness to dig through the thesaurus) has lit the way through many difficult situations.

Re: (next Rich)

#130

Post by kudokatz »

brundolf wrote: post #82

Rich has to be my favorite thinker in this space, absolutely love his talks and the way he articulates things, and I often draw from his philosophies in my work But, I've always been turned off to Clojure by the lack of static typing (I know spec exists, but it's not really the same thing). I did a little project once to try it out, and even there I found myself spending time debugging basic issues like passing the w…

> I found myself spending time debugging basic issues like passing the wrong number or wrong kinds of arguments to functions

You'll get over that pretty fast. The bigger issue is looking at some code and wondering "just what in God's name is in that 10-level map and why?"

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