Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure - Rich Hickey
What it is
Rich Hickey's talk at Clojure's tenth anniversary on the kind of programs Clojure is designed for. He argues for situated programs that deal with changing requirements, and for dynamic typing and data over static types.
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN's go-to link in typing debates and for talk lists, and several call it their favorite programming talk even for non-Clojure users.
- 10 people recommended it
- 10 different months
- 3 strong recommendations
- first 2017, last 2026
What HN commenters said
“Rich Hickey has a lot of excellent stuff to say.”
Review of ten years of Clojure and its design wisdom
afandian, 2018-10 · Strong recommendation · in “Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?”
“Highly recommended to read the transcript or watch the video, even if you are not interested in the language itself.”
Situated programs and changing requirements, relevant beyond Clojure
hden, 2020-02 · Strong recommendation · in “Requirements volatility is the core problem of software engineering”
“Whole video is gold, is my fav programming talk of all time.”
Information programming problem explained by Hickey
dominotw, 2020-06 · Strong recommendation · in “A History of Clojure [pdf]”
“I can only recommend watching some of Rich Hickey's talks”
Hickey on data, reuse and dynamic typing
joncampbelldev, 2018-03 · Recommendation · in “Types, and Why You Should Care [video]”
“Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure: Rich Hickey”
Listed among favourite tech talks
nordsieck, 2018-04 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”
“Watch Rich's 'Effective Programs' talk [1] and lmk if you still feel that he's out of touch with modern large scale programming.”
Hickey on large scale programming and dynamic types
rboyd, 2018-06 · Recommendation · in “Clojure Error Messages Are Accidental”
“Here's a video of the creator of Clojure explaining his preference for dynamic vs static languages”
Clojure creator explains choosing dynamic over static typing
PKop, 2018-11 · Recommendation · in “Minesweeper in Clojure”
“The whole talk is worth watching.”
Higher level problems of business app development and how Clojure addresses them
blacktriangle, 2021-07 · Recommendation · in “How Dwarf Fortress is built”
Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.
Topics: rich hickey, clojure, dynamic typing, situated programs, data-oriented programming
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