[mcguire]

After reading the original article and Hickey's response, I'm significantly less sympathetic to Hickey.

Here's the question: would Rock Hickey be Rich Hickey without Clojure? Would Cogitech exist without Clojure?

I understand both sides. I know the frustration of living with someone's arbitrary decisions. I also know the frustration of getting nothing but attacks from something I have worked hard to give away.

But Hickey has a higher standard here. He's gotten a lot more from the community than he admits in his response. It reads like he wants sympathy for all he has missed ot given away because of his work on Clojure. That's not a good response.

[blain_the_train]

So would rich be rich without the language that rich built? This is a hilarious way of looking at it. There answer is yes.

[ledgerdev]

Great comment. Cognitect, and it's ownership/dominance of the language, is one of the more unfortunate things to happen to clojure in it's evolution, and should serve as a learning point for future language creators.

I wish Rich had been able to find/take a different path and developed more of a community with a "social contract" rather than keeping clojure a semi private project which users should be grateful for the ability to use. It would bring more participation from a wider community which would make the language and community far stronger in the long run.

Recent interactions I've had with the ReasonML project are night and day different than clojure.

At this point it feels like there needs to be a clojure like language (fixing some problems like startup time) that embraces more of a social contract with the community.

[Naomarik]

An unfortunate thing? That a project's own creator ensures the quality of its future?

What I've realized as I grown older is that the majority of people are not worth my time. Loads of people will actively waste your time and talk about things without knowledge. If you listen to Rich speak in any of his presentations or interviews, it's pretty obvious he knows the same thing and his inner circle are extremely intelligent. If you want to progress you must eliminate the garbage and keep the most quality people you can around you.

We now have like 5 main versions and variants of javascript that came out in the last few years that all look like complete rubbish (purely my opinion). There seems to be a new build tool coming up every 3 months. Everyone is making a library for things as basic as calling an API or padding a string. At one point not so long ago I was one of the programmers who needed said libraries to get work done.

The code for clojure is open source. If anyone absolutely must use clojure they can do a better job than Cognitect just fork it. Or keep learning the new version of javascript that inevitably comes out every year.

[mercer]

I personally don't necessarily agree with the 'significantly', but I do agree that some of the concerns raised, however poorly and entitled, are valid.