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Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

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Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#41

Post by lifeisstillgood »

aero142 wrote: post #29
chongli wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simplicity is hard work. But, there's a huge payoff. I hate to be cynical in a thread about a very optimistic and insightful speaker but I think that it will always be the case that people will trade off easy work early on for more pain late in the game. This is called hyperbolic discounting and it's an extremely common cognitive bias in humans. The only way we'll overcome this is through extensive education and a dr…

I'll ask a question. Have you seen a correlation between companies that have simpler code bases and are more successful in the long run? Personally, I've never seen it. The most successful companies have horrible code bases that are eventually replaced by well written modular architectures if the become successful. I personally love the idea and value of simple code but I can't say I've seen a lot of evidence for it.

that would be markets where the deciding factor is software. I suspect you are thinking of say windows where the quality of codebase was lesser factor than installed base etc

I would suggest that web browsers is a good example - IE market share vs say Mozilla. other examples are Sage vs freeagnet ?

hard to unpick market tactics and strategy from code - but it's hard to deny there is a link intuitively

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#42

Post by Sandman »

KevinEldon wrote: post #32
zerr wrote: 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.

Oh shit, I have learned a lot from Rich's talks... so your talks must be much more useful. Where can I find them? Please tell me you have some talks? You have such great ideas, or communicate such "extremely simple" ideas so well that others (or even you yourself) have recorded them for me to watch. No talks? So you keep this knowledge to yourself and shit all over a guy who shares his knowledge with a community? You…

I really wish this is the last time I see a comment like this on HN. This is nothing but an angry, sarcastic rant by somebody who, I can only presume, had a really bad day. There is absolutely nothing civil in this comment.

While I completely disagree with the grandparent comment, I understand that that's his/her opinion, nothing more. What Hickey talks about may seem obvious, but only in hindsight, at least to me. It seems that most of the commenters in this thread feel the same way. However, I can accept that there are people, like Zerr, who would find Hickey's talks to be rather boring stuff, since they are already well aware of everything he talks about. So there's really no need to reply to these people with hateful comments like this one.

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#43

Post by klibertp »

KevinEldon wrote: post #32
zerr wrote: 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.

Oh shit, I have learned a lot from Rich's talks... so your talks must be much more useful. Where can I find them? Please tell me you have some talks? You have such great ideas, or communicate such "extremely simple" ideas so well that others (or even you yourself) have recorded them for me to watch. No talks? So you keep this knowledge to yourself and shit all over a guy who shares his knowledge with a community? You…

Hey, stop it. Grandparent presented his opinion about the talks. It's perfectly possible that for him they are not new or interesting. He's not shitting on anything, he's just presenting his feelings about some things. While it's somewhat off-topic, it doesn't deserve a response like yours.

Personally I like Rich talks very much, they were eye opening for me, although I agree that they focus on simple things. That's why they are so interesting. On the other hand I'm not a fan of Clojure - I'm trying to be, but my love for certain other Lisps gets in the way.

Are you going to tell me to fuck off because I said, in effect, that in my opinion there are better Lisps than Clojure?

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#44

Post by tedunangst »

hdevalence wrote: post #35
tedunangst wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people seem to like pushing descriptivism too far. "Somebody said it, therefore it's correct."

What basis for judgements of correctness would you suggest, if not facts about how English speakers speak English?

A majority, or at least a substantial minority? (Don't interpret common mistakes as proof of correctness. Most (all?) people who spell 'lose' as 'loose' will at least acknowledge their mistake when it's pointed it out. Nobody thinks 'loose' is actually correct in their "not prestige" dialect.)

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#46

Post by kriro »

wicknicks wrote: post #25

Rich Hickey is a genius. I love how he connected music to software engineering [1]. He should write a book on some of these topics. He has a lot more than 45 mins talks to offer to the world. [1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Perfor...

I've been waiting for a book that elaborates on simple design a la Hickey (with some examples/code) ever since I saw the "simple made easy" talk. If there is one that I missed, I'd love to know.

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#47

Post by babuskov »

mattjaynes wrote: post #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…

True if your product is a success. But if you're building 10 projects and only one of then succeeds, you just spent 9 times enormous amount of time you will never get back. One could argue that rewriting the successful one from scratch would still take less time than that.

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#48

Post by kriro »

KevinEldon wrote: post #34
KevinEldon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh shit, I have learned a lot from Rich's talks... so your talks must be much more useful. Where can I find them? Please tell me you have some talks? You have such great ideas, or communicate such "extremely simple" ideas so well that others (or even you yourself) have recorded them for me to watch. No talks? So you keep this knowledge to yourself and shit all over a guy who shares his knowledge with a community? You…

I'm going to reply to myself to clarify my harsh words. It is very easy to say something sucks. Windows sucks. Linux sucks. Lisp sucks. Apple Sucks. Google Sucks. It doesn't mean anything to say it. It is not useful to say something sucks, you cannot fix "sucks". Saying what is wrong with something is useful. Saying Rich's talks are "simple" is something, except most people don't seem to agree, so it would be much mo…

Your comments suck.

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#49

Post by stonemetal »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #41
aero142 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll ask a question. Have you seen a correlation between companies that have simpler code bases and are more successful in the long run? Personally, I've never seen it. The most successful companies have horrible code bases that are eventually replaced by well written modular architectures if the become successful. I personally love the idea and value of simple code but I can't say I've seen a lot of evidence for it.

that would be markets where the deciding factor is software. I suspect you are thinking of say windows where the quality of codebase was lesser factor than installed base etc I would suggest that web browsers is a good example - IE market share vs say Mozilla. other examples are Sage vs freeagnet ? hard to unpick market tactics and strategy from code - but it's hard to deny there is a link intuitively

My sense of what is intuitive follows his http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html

Basically code quality doesn't really matter, product vision is what matters.

Re: Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits

#50

Post by larve »

kriro wrote: post #46
wicknicks wrote: post #25

Rich Hickey is a genius. I love how he connected music to software engineering [1]. He should write a book on some of these topics. He has a lot more than 45 mins talks to offer to the world. [1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Perfor...

I've been waiting for a book that elaborates on simple design a la Hickey (with some examples/code) ever since I saw the "simple made easy" talk. If there is one that I missed, I'd love to know.

paradigms of artificial intelligence by norvig, although seemingly about something completely different, has the same "simplicity" in its code.
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