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by JBiserkov 2743 days ago
Rich Hickey is a great thinker. But he's also an application developer (Datomic). So breaking changes don't just break "other people's code" in the abstract. The pain is real and immediate. By wearing multiple hats he's finding the right balance in a way that language designers who don't code day-to-day simply can't.
1 comments
trevor-e 2743 days ago
The deification of Rich Hickey in this thread is amusing. No doubt he's a great developer and language designer, but dogfooding your own language is not exactly novel.
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ghufran_syed 2743 days ago
I think the original statement was implicitly about using the language to build large complex systems in industry, not just about "using" the language which I agree would be kind of silly - who would work on a language they don't use in some way? But I always had the impression that most language designers were academics, e.g Alan Kay, Stroustrup, or professional programmers building what were initially 'hobby' languages (Ruby, python) rather than building something they would use in production in industry.

Standards must be low if that's now "deification" :)

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trevor-e 2743 days ago
I got the point of the original statement, but again, even building a large and complex system is not unique to Clojure. Go was used internally within Google, Swift within Apple, and Rust within Mozilla, to name a few.
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jwr 2742 days ago
I'm not really sure where you see this "deification" — but as for me, I simply have a lot of respect for him. Mostly because every year or so he comes back with another solution to one of my problems. I don't agree with all his choices (I find some of his naming compromises particularly bad), but I still respect (not "deify") him.

Listen to some of his talks and you will see why people respect Rich.

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JBiserkov 2741 days ago
>The deification of Rich Hickey in this thread is amusing.

Hi Trevor,

funny that you should say that - I've met Rich Hickey and had some great conversations with him - and what I always tell everybody is how normal, humble, human, down-to-Earth he is. (Which is probably deifying him even more, from your point of view).

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