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Hammock-driven Development

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99 pointsfogus17 comments

I really want to know what the other two things (besides Clojure) were that Rich thought about for a year.

It's interesting to me: This talk was much broader than any talk I've heard from him before. I can imagine watching this and thinking "this is all pointless fluff", if I were in a certain mindset. But having worked on a project for a while and encountered this exact problem, I think this talk is genius. (Because the non-fluff, the concrete examples are coming from my own experiences.)

And after you've watched the video grab something off Rich Hickey's killer list of books (note that the list includes a hammock), http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Bookshelf/lm/R3LG3ZBZS4GCTH

That has to be the only hammock on Amazon with "lisp" and "call-with-current-continuation" as suggested tags: http://www.amazon.com/Original-Pawleys-Island-Hammock-Presid...

Last year Rich gave a great talk about Clojure's approach to persistent data structures (but really identity and state): http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-Rich...

Everyone should watch that talk. It's the most compelling I've yet seen for the relevance of applicative programming. I was not convinced, but I was closer than I've ever been to being convinced.

I was at this talk; it was excellent. Watch it.

I agree. This is full of rich observations and analogies for anyone who is interested in design from a development point of view.

Basically it's full of lots of distilled wisdom from a smart guy who has come up with a fair number of beautiful solutions to hard problems.

I don't know much about Clojure (I wrote my last Java/Lisp code years ago) however I strongly recommend this talk to every developer. As good as it is at clarifying the development process, I also enjoyed it a lot too because it was thought provoking and funny at times.

I am so proud to proclaim that I was there at that talk in person, and I watched Rich inspire a whole generation of programmers with that talk.

I read the title, watched the first couple minutes, skimmed a few more minutes, and I -still- have no idea where he was going.

What exactly was supposed to entice me into watching 40 minutes of that?

Clearly Rich failed at fitting the whole of his talk into discrete Tweet-sized portions. For a talk about thinking through problems you would think he would have thought about that angle. Sheesh.

About four minutes in he gets to what he's actually going to talk about.

For anyone who doesn't want to skim through to get an idea, he talks about his philosophy on thinking about the problems he's working on rather than always going straight through them. When you spend some time away from the computer just thinking about what you're working on, or working through completely separate problems every other day, it gives your brain time to process all the separate components that are too big to fit in your working memory at one time. This allows you to create connections during the day (or after a night of sleep) that lead to seeing the problem and its solutions in a new light.

So...basically the Eureka Phenomenon?

Does this mean the Clojure Conj videos are all up?

No. They are going to be available gradually.

Any chance there is a transcript or write up of the talk?

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