"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."
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 dramatic change in culture (particularly office culture).
"Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him." -- PG
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.
Rich is quite possibly the greatest marketing asset for the Clojure programming language. After listening to one of his talks (about concurrency) I realized that there is an extremely smart person that does a lot of thinking and makes a lot of sense, so perhaps Clojure might be worth a try. Haven't regretted it.
What I loved about this talk is that it seemed more a 'philosophy of programming' thing, where a lot of what he said applied even to my shitty programming, and (hopefully) even improved it.
[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Perfor...
I love those talks, and every once in a while I watch them again so I don't forget the basic principles.
Rich went 2 step ahead than simple state what some people feels as obvious: he created a language that implements them, and he communicated those concepts.
He did something to better the trade. Have you?
This is not about the next tool to make a quick buck, or cute, but impractical, philosophical concepts
And, I too would put "Simple made easy" as the first one. Then it becomes much easier to understand why functions are the 555 chip of software development.
We always have a good conversation afterwards.
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.
Your comment is terrible. You shit on Rich, you shit on Clojure, and say nothing other than you're so superior that you get nothing from anything Rich says. Fuck you (yes, that's not subtle, but your comment is passive-aggressive bullshit or perhaps you lack the ability to clearly state WHY you do not think a talk is useful).
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.
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?
In your "clever" attempt at irony, you ask your parent about his own, presumably better talks. Please take a moment to reflect on how utterly stupid this line of attack is!
Give up? OK, here's the explanation, by analogy: I'm completely incapable of building an automobile. Yet, having driven both, I'm qualified to comment that a Geo Prizm is an underpowered, shoddily constructed car - at least when compared to my Lexus. A talk is a product created for the benefit of an audience, and as the consumers of such a service, the audience - including the GP - is probably best qualified to judge it. To imply that only a producer of talks may have an opinion on a talk is shockingly stupid.
Before you attempt another such put-down, please consider how it will reflect on you, and whether it might not be more sensible to keep your mouth shut!
'We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.'
I often return to basics and understand them in a new way after some time away, and Rich's talks evoke that phenomenon for me more than most.
All the smartest people I know (far smarter than me) are constantly impressed by his talks - and discussing with them often makes me realise I've missed some bigger-picture concepts.
So my conclusion (in lieu of a chat over a beer with the person to dig deeper) is to assume that superficial dismissal of his talks mostly demonstrate a superficial understanding of the content.
