[lkrubner]

I’m worried that I will either overestimate or underestimate how much you’ve followed the conversation regarding brevity and programming. If I’m saying something you already know, please disregard my comment.

In other essays, Zach Tellman has made the point that Clojure is unique in that it’s syntax allows it’s written to form to almost exactly represent its AST tree. The comparison then is between Arc and Clojure and between Paul Graham and Rich Hickey. Both men wrote essays about programming which seemed to promise new ideas but Hickey delivered real innovations whereas we can now see that Graham was unable to deliver. And Graham’s failure is in part traceable to his inability to make explicit what he actually knows, or why he believes the things that he asserts.

The debate over how to make tacit knowledge explicit is important. The debate over what constitutes good programming is important to the whole tech industry. I’m astonished that you would think this essay was merely a matter of gossip.

It’s possible that Tellman should have repeated some of his earlier essays, to give more context to his remarks, but this is the Web, so he embedded hyperlinks to some of the previous discussions.