One of my favorite quotes from Rich Hickey:<p>"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."<p><a href="http://devopsu.com/blog/simplicity-is-key/" rel="nofollow">http://devopsu.com/blog/simplicity-is-key/</a>
Rich Hickey has great track record of being <i>spot on</i>. He seems to know exactly where the pain points of software engineering are, and proposes sound solutions.<p>In this talk he explains how Datomic works, but more importantly, what the reasoning behind it is:<p><a href="http://www.infoq.com/interviews/hickey-datomic-cap" rel="nofollow">http://www.infoq.com/interviews/hickey-datomic-cap</a><p>Everybody should watch this, as the concepts behind it apply to any system.
This is a great list, now I can refer my new programmers to a single place.<p>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.
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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Performance" rel="nofollow">http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Design-Composition-Perfor...</a>
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"<p>I love those talks, and every once in a while I watch them again so I don't forget the basic principles.<p>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.<p>He did something to better the trade. Have you?<p>This is not about the next tool to make a quick buck, or cute, but impractical, philosophical concepts<p>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.
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.