
Rich Hickey fanclub - talles
https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub
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dustingetz
Pasting from midway down

 _Fogus: In an old paper of yours, “Callbacks in C++ Using Template Functors”,
you write favorably about C++, OOP, and static typing. Why did you change your
mind?_

 _Hickey: I’m not sure I did. I said C++ was flexible—it is—and that, when
implementing a callback system for C++, one should remain aligned with its
object orientation and static typing. More interesting to me, in rereading it,
is that I am still now making the same arguments I made then, fifteen years
ago, against mixins and derivation as extension mechanisms._

 _That said, I certainly was a fan of C++ in the day, and five more years of
it cured me of that. The complexity is stunning. It failed as the library
language it purported to be, due to lack of GC, in my opinion, and static
typing failed to keep large OO systems from becoming wretched balls of mud.
Large mutable object graphs are the sore point, and const is inadequate to
address it. Once C++’s performance advantage eroded or became less important,
you had to wonder—why bother? I can’t imagine working in a language without GC
today, except in very special circumstances._

 _Along the way, I discovered Common Lisp, which was much more flexible,
dynamic, simpler, and fast enough, and decided that was how I wanted to
program. Finally, with Clojure, that is becoming possible, and practical, for
me._

