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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

This is why I am highly suspicious of Clojure and its fans. This is a little too much.

Is there a Martin Odersky fanclub? Or Brendan Eich? Or Rob Pike? (OK, Rob Pike is actually close to having one).

But this looks cult-ish to me.

Penalizing the language because the people who use it really like the creator seems like an odd way to approach languages.

That said, I will say that Rich's talks and his approach resonate with me in ways that none of those other guys you mentioned do.

It may just be how he chooses to structure his talks and how he expresses himself, but his willingness to both critique existing systems and provide (arguably) better solutions is really refreshing. I don't see that being communicated well in other talks.

I read through the repo and it's basically a page about his work. There's very little there that isn't totally objective. Cults tend to go on and on about things that either don't exist or are being attributed great powers that are, at best, not objectively verifiable, or at worst, are objective refutable. This seems to have neither.

All right, maybe cult is too strong a word. What I meant is "obsession". I have my share of friends who often start their posts with "oh, look, Rich just _nailed_ it this time!". They watch all his videos etc.

(I don't like video talks at all. Reading is so much faster.)

>I have my share of friends who often start their posts with "oh, look, Rich just _nailed_ it this time!" They watch all his videos etc.

And that's a cult? Wait till you discover PG fans...

(Or Agile evangelists for that matter)

Is agile still a thing? I thought that it became just The Way To Code In Big Enterprise, as it happens to all of it.

Now it's Scrum and co, but, yeah, same shit.

>Is there a Martin Odersky fanclub? Or Brendan Eich? Or Rob Pike?

No, Hickey has a fan club. Go is a cult -- and judging from the language design, it's a "back to nature", Amish kind of affair.

Completely agree.

The page is basically The collected works. I have The Complete Works of Mark Twain, that doesn't make me a cult follower. The same with this page.

I think you're being a little too literal here.

Maybe if you spent more time with the material you would be less suspicious?

K&R? DHH? Matz? Joe Armstrong? Guido? Larry Wall? I'd say those all have bigger 'followings' than Rich Hickey, or at least did back in their time.

So you're suspicious of your friends and are forming your opinion on a programming language based on that? Right....

Oh, of course I tried coding in Clojure. Wasn't immediately excited :)

He may be cute, but he's no Hadley Wickham!

- R Fan Club

What about Python's Guido van Rossum? Or Larry Wall I am much more suspicious of them than of Hickey.

A = {Rich Hickey fans}

B = {Clojure developers}

(A \ B) ∪ (B \ A) ≠ ∅

IRL, I've actually met two people who've watched and enjoyed talks by Hickey, but I haven't met a single one who's actually tried Clojure...

Does any of them has any charisma?

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