Design, Composition and Performance [video]

Truly a great speaker/thinker, able to communicate his thoughts well.

As a former avid Scala developer, I started down the path of watching every Rich Hickey presentation I could find one week. Every video tweaked my thinking just a tad (as I almost always agree with his line of thinking), and I came out of it a better functional programmer and a Clojure developer.

Note: I still do/love Scala, I just develop much less of it in favor of Clojure.

AFAIK registration isn't required on infoq, and I'm watching it right now.

Alright, so only downloads require registration.

I love it when musical and computational composition get paralleled. I just saw a different talk focused on this theme recently, focusing on Goldberg variations using the Overtone library in Clojure. You actually get to hear things build up as you see the code do the same in this one, really cool.

video: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/functional-composition

repo: https://github.com/ctford/goldberg

(edited to add the video link)

For me, the most poignant message in this talk is when Rich draws the contrast between learning an instrument, which no one pretends is an easy task, and learning a new programming language, which seems to be increasingly accompanied by "learn X in 5 days" type tutorials.

A performer who has already mastered one or more musical instruments will be better able to rapidly learn a new one, but a novice is going to need to toil away for years before they reach master-level proficiency. Similarly with programming, I think it is fine for languages to present themselves succinctly for the benefit of experienced developers, but I am highly suspicious of anyone who claims you can learn to program in less than, say, 2 years.

I also think this is something to keep in mind with the recent explosion of "alternative programming schools". You can hand someone a guitar and, in a handful of weeks, teach them all the cords for 10 popular tunes. That person can then find a street corner in the nearest city, set down their open guitar case, and play those ten songs in rotation and make some money...but have we created a new musician?