
Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits (2013) - tosh
https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits
======
drcode
BTW Rich Hickey talks are great music albums: The first time you listen to
them you think "yeah, I guess it's ok, but not a big deal."

Then 6 months later you are still thinking about points he made in the talk.

~~~
unkown-unknowns
Rich Hickey reminds me a little bit of Bob Ross. Maybe sometime many years in
the future Rich will be known by as many people as Bob is today.

------
cjauvin
Related: [https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-
fanclub](https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub)

------
whipoodle
I think people like the sound of the ideas he's espousing in "Simple made
easy", but toward he has some pretty specific examples of complexity that are
often ignored. Like, I've worked with people who would fervently recommend the
talk, but still love for-loops.

~~~
endlessvoid94
Pesky human behavior!

~~~
whipoodle
I suppose. But if you're talking about keeping things simple and not
complecting them, but then you go around doing just that... what are you
really talking about, you know?

~~~
always_good
Well, for-loops also aren't really the complexity that matters in a large app.
I'd rather someone write for-loops yet aim for higher level simplicity.

Maybe you're overscrutinizing the trees.

~~~
whipoodle
Aaaaaa I'm not specifically talking about for-loops

~~~
abiox
perhaps you've 'complected' this thread. :)

------
tw1010
I like Hickey and Clojure. But part of me feels sad and pessimistic when I
think him and his project. The stuff he was working on at the beginning,
although new to most people who were exposed to it, wasn't new to the software
engineering community at large. And now it's a decade later and it still feels
like it hasn't progressed as far as it aught to given how much time and how
many man-hours have been spent on it.

~~~
einrealist
Doing things right is hard and it often requires more time. My feeling is that
the majority of software engineers are less interested in detail and doing
things right and more interested in getting things done. And most environments
encourage to get things done (time to market) with all the bad results (broken
/ insecure software, bad architecture). In pure functional languages doing
what's right is often the only way to get things done. This is why there is a
smaller audience to Clojure or Haskell.

It's dreadful to explain the average engineer (in my environment) basic
principles of design and architecture over and over again (like what is an URI
/ URN / URL, or why should I use Strings as general identifiers rather than
exposing the numeric value from the database to the outside) just to see them
dismissing everything in the next second. Now, when I tell them to look into
Clojure or Haskell just to learn something.... No I don't do that. Its sad.

But Kudos to Rich. I find it is more important that he is talking / lecturing
about basic principles of software design and architecture and using Clojure
as an example, despite Clojure's actual success.

~~~
jshen
When you say "doing things right", what does "right" mean exactly? I see
people say this a lot, and I think that I do things "right", but my definition
of "right" is very different from yours.

My definition of "right", create the most value at the lowest cost.

My assumption is that when you say "right" you mean, "done in a way that
produces the fewest bugs". If this is true, there is no consideration of the
costs in your definition which seems wrong to me. At this point I usually hear
people who make similar claims to you respond by saying, our "right" way
doesn't cost more, or even costs less.

I don't think this is true, and here's why. If it's true, your "right" way
would produce better software at the same price. If that's true one of the
following would also be true.

1\. companies doing it the "right" way would, on average, beat companies doing
it the not "right" way. I have seen no evidence of this, in fact the opposite
seems true. 2\. Having a lower bug count has no bearing on the success of
companies so there is no correlation between the "right" way and the not
"right way. I doubt this is true, but I could be wrong.

What I think is true is that your "right" way costs significantly more, and
the market in most cases has shown time and again that it's not worth the
cost.

Edit: fixed a typo and some formatting.

~~~
ballenf
I don't know that financial success is the be-all end-all measuring stick that
I want to measure my code against. It is important because I also like to eat
and sleep in a bed. But most any talented engineers could make vastly more
money doing shady stuff. But very few do and that's a fact that I find rather
amazing and gives me great pride in this profession.

Point is simply that I don't want to throw out all measures of quality of
craftsmanship except financial.

I love Bob Martin's line that the dirty secret of programmers is that we'd
still do it whether they paid us or not.

------
dorian-graph
Related: One of my current side-projects I'm creating is a podcast of
'greatest hits' from any authors.

~~~
tosh
Do you have a list/gist you can share already?

~~~
dorian-graph
Kind of—I have several lists, compiled by others. Here's some:

\- [http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2014/05/29/must-see-tech-
tal...](http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2014/05/29/must-see-tech-talks-for-
every-programmer/)

\- [https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1198/what-
video...](https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1198/what-videos-
should-everybody-watch)

\- [https://github.com/JanVanRyswyck/awesome-
talks](https://github.com/JanVanRyswyck/awesome-talks)

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5511466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5511466)

\- [https://github.com/hellerve/programming-
talks](https://github.com/hellerve/programming-talks)

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637239](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637239)

Plenty of material. ;)

~~~
noir_lord
Would be interesting to have a monthly mailshot with recent ones, so much
material but a lot of chaff as well.

------
borisj
Is there an updated list? This is from 2013

~~~
devin
Original author here. I will take a whack at updating it.

