
Rich Hickey's Greatest Hits - sant0sk1
http://thechangelog.com/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits/
======
mattjaynes
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 that
ability to change things when you're struggling to push elephants around."

[http://devopsu.com/blog/simplicity-is-
key/](http://devopsu.com/blog/simplicity-is-key/)

~~~
tedunangst
Fun nit: this is one of the times when _effect_ is the correct word to use.

~~~
derleth
Depends on the variety of English. What you said is true for the prestige
dialect, certainly.

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Kaizyn
There ain't no such thing as a prestige dialect in English. In all of them,
"affect change" is just plain wrong.

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derleth
> There ain't no such thing as a prestige dialect in English.

I sincerely hope this is sarcasm.

> In all of them, "affect change" is just plain wrong.

Cite?

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Kaizyn
Hello derleth:

"Effect. As noun, means result; as verb, means to bring about, accomplish (not
to be confused with affect, which means "to influence")."
[http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk3.html](http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk3.html)

Affect vs. Effect:
[http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sullivan/CommonWritingErrors.html#...](http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sullivan/CommonWritingErrors.html#Affect_vs._Effect_)

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derleth
Those sources don't define correctness. Especially Strunk and White, which is
pretty well debunked at this point:

[http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003463.php](http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003463.php)

~~~
Kaizyn
Sorry, derleth. It's not a matter of someone defining correct usage. It's
simply a matter of looking at the dictionary definitions of the words 'affect'
and 'effect'. Affect simply means to influence while effect means to bring
about.

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hcarvalhoalves
Rich Hickey has great track record of being _spot on_. He seems to know
exactly where the pain points of software engineering are, and proposes sound
solutions.

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](http://www.infoq.com/interviews/hickey-datomic-cap)

Everybody should watch this, as the concepts behind it apply to any system.

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jwr
This is a great list, now I can refer my new programmers to a single place.

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.

~~~
erichmond
I took the same path. I was actually a bit skeptical at his talks initially,
but once they sunk in, he's really head of the curve on this stuff.

------
jacquesm
Simple made easy has my vote for the #1 spot, it isn't about clojure as much
as about general principles. I really love that talk.

~~~
grayrest
I'll also vote Simple Made Easy above Are We There Yet. I've talked about it
at length with a bunch of other programmers and get consistently better
responses from starting people with Simple Made Easy.

~~~
mercer
If this is the talk I think it is, I can say it helped me greatly as a
programmer. I'm one of those 'homegrown' programmers with no formal education,
and I'd probably horrify some of you with my work. But I'm learning, and very
aware of my deficiencies.

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.

~~~
jacquesm
For me the biggest change was 'structured programming', Niklaus Wirth and K&R
changed the way I looked at code completely. Pascal was never my favorite
language but after 'Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs' I became a much
better programmer pretty much overnight.

~~~
mercer
Haha, yeah, that's pretty much the single most useful thing I learned.

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wicknicks
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...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Performance)

~~~
kriro
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.

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

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jorgeleo
I read the list of comments and I find disappointing too see people saying
things like "he talk simple stuff", or "this is too basic, I got nothing out
of it"

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.

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twic
We sometimes watch Rich Hickey's talks in the office.

We always have a good conversation afterwards.

~~~
twopoint718
That's exactly what I've started doing at my office. We watch a talk per week
and discuss it after. Rich Hickey occupies several rows of the spreadsheet!

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hadem
Is your spreadsheet of talks publicly available?

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twopoint718
I could make it that way, it's still pretty small at the moment. Here's the
current list:

Theraputic refactoring - Katrina Owen, The Future of Programming - Bret
Victor, Simplicity matters -Rich Hickey, Hammock Driven Development - Rich
Hickey, Programming with nothing - Tom Stuart, Connections: Faith in Numbers -
James Burke, Growing a Language - Guy Steele, Y Not - Adventures in Functional
Programming - Jim Weirich, Cool Code - Kevlin Henney, We Really Don't Know How
to Compute! - Gerald Jay Sussman, Keynote: Architecture the Lost Years - Bob
Martin, Computer Heuristics - Richard Feynman, The Power of Abstraction -
Barbara Liskov, The Mother of All Demos - Douglas Engelbart

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zerr
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.

~~~
KevinEldon
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?

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).

~~~
Sandman
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.

~~~
KevinEldon
I had a pretty good day and I'm not an angry person. I was very uncivil in
response to what I understood to be a dismissive comment wrapped in civility.
Comments tearing down someone else's real work without offering alternatives
or constructive criticism are easy to make and damaging, but my tone and
choice of language didn't communicate my message. I'm sorry that it bothered
you. I generally do not post w/ this tone and will be more careful in choosing
the right tone to communicate my meaning in the future. Thanks for your
feedback.

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talles
I love this guy since the first time I watched 'Are We There Yet?'.

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dgellow
Is there a way to get transcriptions from infoq presentations ?

~~~
Elrac
I often wish there was, too. I _hate_ being forced to watch the video to
assimilate what a person has to say. At work, it's not an option for me.

