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Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

thechangelog.com

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Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#2
While 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.

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#3
One 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/

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#5
post #2

While 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.

> 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.

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#6
Rich 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

Everybody should watch this, as the concepts behind it apply to any system.

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#7
post #2

While 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.

What he talks about may be obvious to you, but is probably not the reality for 90% of the industry.

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#9
post #8

We sometimes watch Rich Hickey's talks in the office. We always have a good conversation afterwards.

That'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!

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#10
post #4

Simple 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.

I'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.
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