Rich Hickey's response to “On whose authority?”

My favorite sentence from the response is this one: “The presumption that everything is or ought to be a community endeavor is severely broken.” Community is a broad word. It can mean a bunch of very smart people working in concert to produce something truly magnificent, or it can mean giving the keys to a bunch of clowns and watching them mess around and make fun of themselves.<p>I really wonder this whenever I see some new-fangled open source project putting out a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md stating community is a top value. Look, you are primarily writing software not trying to foster a community. A community can be helpful to produce great software, but a community can also mean additional mental and emotional toll, and clowns introducing discussions with little merit.

I&#x27;ve read the original article and, to be quite honest, couldn&#x27;t actually determine what point it was trying to make. The action items seemed to have very little to do with the rest of the rant.<p>I actually read the response first and the weird thing is: I couldn&#x27;t really tell you what exactly the response is replying to. I feel like the whole thing is a huge amount of verbiage expressing frustration and broken motives but any actual solid facts mentioned are peripheral at best to what&#x27;s being said.<p>I could write multiple pages on how I fell out of love with Clojure but I doubt it would benefit anyone and it&#x27;d be a huge pain to do.<p>Clojure is the product of a singular aesthetic, for better or worse.

&quot;Entitlement&quot; really captures the post Rich is responding to. Objections to the existence of Arachne and spec? Who is Chris Zheng to tell people what to spend their time and money on? And he wants Datomic open sourced. Waaah.

Hard to deny he has a good way with words!<p>I can&#x27;t speak for the author Rich is replying to, but I have seen many in the community comment on the opaqueness of Cognitect, even comparing it to Apple. That&#x27;s not necessarily bad, but it does have the unfortunate effect of letting some people&#x27;s imaginations run with negativity in their assumptions about a company&#x27;s motivations.<p>Even if Cognitect did make money on Clojure, not sure why that should be a source of frustration. It&#x27;s quite an amazing language, people should have some reward for their contributions to the industry, right?

By the way, Clojurescript is one of the greatest tools I&#x27;ve ever experienced in the software industry. And it is maintained by a real smart guy that gets paid by Cognitect to work on it. Isn&#x27;t this a case of Cognitect spending money to improve free tools for the world? Which is the opposite of the original article&#x27;s accusations?

After reading the original article and Hickey&#x27;s response, I&#x27;m significantly less sympathetic to Hickey.<p>Here&#x27;s the question: would Rock Hickey be Rich Hickey without Clojure? Would Cogitech exist without Clojure?<p>I understand both sides. I know the frustration of living with someone&#x27;s arbitrary decisions. I also know the frustration of getting nothing but attacks from something I have worked hard to give away.<p>But Hickey has a higher standard here. He&#x27;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&#x27;s not a good response.

This kind of drama is not healthy for technology. Do yourself a favor and don&#x27;t waste time reading this, nor the original article it&#x27;s responding to.

As the author of the &#x27;diatribe&#x27;, I&#x27;m concerned that a personal account of my experience with a programming language and my reasons that I&#x27;m lacking motivation to continue to program in that language has generated this type of response. Yes, it was personal. Yes, it hurts to be rejected. Yes, it&#x27;s a part of life.<p>I felt that Rich&#x27;s response was fair. There is so much frustration and pain in the search for perfection. He has given his heart and soul to the language so of course it was expected. I&#x27;m really glad he still cares so much for the language. It&#x27;s rare to see such a raw, passionate reply like that and I know that the language is in great hands.

The original article (which has been flag-killed) was pretty poor, but included this link in the comments: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lispcast.com&#x2F;cognitect-clojure" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lispcast.com&#x2F;cognitect-clojure</a>

A tangent, but I find it interesting that they don&#x27;t make any money from Clojure conferences. There are a few hundred attendees paying 500 USD&#x2F;EUR, and they organise several conferences per year. I guess paying a few people&#x27;s salary is good too according to the motivations expressed in the text.

Poor response. Basically &quot;we&#x27;re not actually evil, just trust me&quot;. Why should it be a question of trust? A programming language that is controlled by one for-profit organization is an obviously bad idea. And the last paragraph, where he suddenly goes straight for a personal attack is completely uncalled for. You, a rockstar creator of a language are in no position to personally insult your users. Never punch down.<p>Of course Clojure zealots lapped it up.

The initial article and this rebuff are a lot to do about nothing.

good

I get that this is important to the Lisp crew, but is this at all relevant to the general audience of HN?<p>What&#x27;s the takeaway: avoid Closure because of one drama? Rich is right about everything? Copmuters are terrible?