/Rich-Hickey-fanclub

"every time I watch one of his talks I feel like someone has gone in and organized my brain"

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A collection about Rich Hickey's works on the internet.

Work

He also made other not as well known lisps prior to Clojure.

On the internet

* Unfortunately, some comments aren't being shown on his user page (such as this one).

Talks

There's also slides from a talk named "Clojure: What just happened?". Transcripts of some of his talks can be found on matthiasn/talk-transcripts.

Interviews

Writings

You can find a few on Clojure blog, Cognitect blog, and InfoQ. He also wrote about how Open Source is Not About You (comments).

There's an old paper (1994) on C++: Callbacks in C++ using template functors. He made some comments on it in an interview years later:

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.

Rich's A History of Clojure (2020) was accepted and included in HOPL-IV. It details history, rationale, process, and people behind Clojure development.

Other people

Here are some people comments on Hickey's work.

There's even a fake twitter account, some questions on Quora, a drawing on DevianArt, and a song on SoundCloud.