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Clojure Concurrency - Rich Hickey

ClojureTV · talk · Watch on YouTube

Functional programmingSoftware architecture & design

What it is

Rich Hickey's long presentation on Clojure and concurrency covers locking and immutability, then goes in depth on refs, transactions and agents. It ends with a multithreaded ant colony simulation demo.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Seen as the definitive explanation of why traditional concurrency is hard and how Clojure's model addresses it, with some commenters crediting it with changing their careers.

  • 5 people recommended it
  • 5 different months
  • 2 strong recommendations
  • first 2013, last 2023

What HN commenters said

  1. “one my favorite talks I ever went to.”

    First half lays out problems with traditional concurrency

    dominotw, 2020-05 · Strong recommendation · in “Optimising for Concurrency: Comparing the BEAM and JVM virtual machines”

  2. “It's saved me time and made me 100 times more productive.”

    Hickey's 2008 Clojure presentation began the commenter's Clojure career

    cmiles74, 2023-08 · Strong recommendation · in “(Next Rich)”

  3. “I like Rich talks and his main point for his invention seems to be: to get concurrency right.”

    Hickey's main point is getting concurrency right

    bachback, 2013-07 · Recommendation · in “Why bother learning Clojure?”

  4. “I won't go into details, because Rich Hickey explains it much, much better than I ever will be able to”

    Hickey explains how Clojure avoids explicit locks

    jwr, 2013-12 · Recommendation · in “Why Johnny Can’t Write Multithreaded Programs”

  5. “A good place to start would be implementing Rich Hickey’s ant colony demo in both Python and Clojure.”

    Ant colony demo as a case where Clojure shines

    cellularmitosis, 2023-04 · Recommendation · in “REBL”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: clojure, rich hickey, stm, immutability, agents

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