Rich Hickey's Keynote: A deconstruction of object-oriented time [pdf]

" ... these talks will slowly trickle onto the infoq website"

Do these videos ever appear someplace for easy download, or will they forever be stuck on someone's walled garden?

If by hand-waving you mean giving life and meaning to a professional occupation that has been stifled by mediocrity, FUD, and decades long short-sightedness, than I gladly welcome it.

As far as pseudo-philosophical, I would direct you immediately to SICP. From the very beginning it points out that the computer can (and SHOULD) represent a beautiful philosophical, even metaphysical, exercise- the understanding of "how things are done".

Mr. Hickey isn't pulling things out of the air here, there's a long tradition of scientists (and hackers) attempting to communicate to their peers - "Hey, start treating your practice with some goddamn respect. PLs are not religions. Like music, really, truly, like any art, like any civilization worth continuing - let's keep striving for something better". Perhaps I'm being overly poetic. But if there's no poetry in your work, then what the f&%k is the point of doing it?

EDIT: original poster deleted his post. As much as I like Hacker News, I find the fact that people can "game" the karma system by deleting comments clearly destined for down modding lamentable. Perhaps the algorithm for karma should be tweaked so that if you have karma, bravely accepting a brutal down modding for a flawed viewpoint should count for something. That is, if you can't accept being wrong, you probably aren't a hacker worth her/his weight in salt- acceptance of the fact there's always something new to learn should be rewarded after the punishment ;)

Although I can't see the original comment anymore, I can imagine it: I was probably thinking along the same lines. Let me try to explain thoughts of the 'hand-waving and pseudo-philosophical' kind:

The main problem with Hickey's presentation is that it is unclear how well he actually understands the philosophy he cites and especially how thoroughly he investigated the alternatives to that philosophy. He presents a single view and doesn't debate it, while it warrants a book of its own.

Something you can see clearly in students of philosophy, psychology and those 'softer' subjects, where multiple truths seem to exist, is that they tend to change opinions and general outlook along with what they learned last. The last thing they read made an impression and it is the first thing on their mind. This lasts until they reach the point of enlightenment, where they notice this fact and start to integrate their knowledge. But not everybody reaches that point, by having studied enough philosophy.

Now you can be a world class physicist or computer scientist: that doesn't make you a good philosopher. In fact, great scientists have been known to espouse some pretty strange philosophies, whose implications they obviously didn't fully grasp. In light of that, Hickey's talk brings to mind the crackpots waving Kuhn's 'paradigm shift' around, without actually understanding it.

It is also unclear how relevant the philosophical grounding is for the actual contents of his talk. If he left all the Whitehead quotes out, wouldn't it be a better presentation? If so, then he's guilty of basically an argument-by-authority: trying to prove his notions about time in programming are good, because he can call upon someone of the stature of Whitehead. I'm not convinced that isn't the case here, although I'm sure it was not the intent.

I think all this 'philo-babble' detracts from the actual point he is trying to make. You're bound to get into endless debates about Whiteheads notion of time and such, while losing sight of the fact that Hickey makes a few practical points that most people probably agree on. A thorough analysis of time in object oriented programming does not need to be a full fledged philosophy and it definitely seems like hubris to present it as such. Hickey should stick to what he knows best and perhaps give some pointers as to philosophies supporting him, instead of making that his main point.

I stand corrected! Thanks for the follow up. Apologies, in the past I have noted that people do in fact delete their comments do avoid downmodding. It would be nice of course after a comment if parent became frozen.

As I understand it, the point of the presentation was highlighting the incidental complexity arising from the implicit instability of mutable state. If an immutable snapshot of the whole program state was an implicit parameter to functions, that wouldn't be so bad. It's the fact that anything can pull out the rug from under your feet at any time that creates the need for paranoid constructs in most classical concurrent programming.