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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

Great story, really enjoyed reading. Rick Hickey is a great speaker (if you haven't watched his talks on youtube, do it! They are totally worth it), and certainly a great programmer, which is why I respect his opinions on dynamic typing, even if I stubbornly disagree (one day I might still dive into Clojure, but I am diving into the arguably opposite end of languages right now: Rust!!). I have even more respect for him now knowing that he actually worked on Clojure for years without any income!! This is a work of passion, and I admire him for that, and for being able to turn that passion into a company big enough to pay his bills and that of several of Clojure's early adopters.

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FWIW, I don't think it really does to treat his opinions on typing as a blanket, universal, prescriptive statement that one can or should agree or disagree with according to one's own blanket, universal, prescriptive position. He generally doesn't come out and say this explicitly, but, in his talks, he's always speaking to a certain audience, about a certain class of problems.

You couldn't come up with a better pair of languages than Clojure and Rust for illustrating this sort of thing. I like them both (as far as my extremely limited experience in each will allow, anyway). But, if a language like Clojure is a candidate for the thing I'm working on, then I would never have dreamed of picking a language like Rust. And vice versa.

To add to that and concur that Rich generally doesn't have such un-nuanced strong opinions without context, see his talk Effective Programs. He explains what Clojure is good for and isn't good for, and says more clearly it so depends on what you're doing.

He doesn't organize the Clojure conferences, but I'd imagine that if he didn't see any value in any context for static typing, there wouldn't have been a talk about Typed Racket and static typing researchers as keynote speakers, etc.

And FWIW, spec is a library trying to come as close as possible to the imaginary midpoint of static and dynamic typing, but in a Clojure-y way.

>I have even more respect for him now knowing that he actually worked on Clojure for years without any income!!

Hickey mentioned in one of his talks that he actually burned through retirement savings (at least some?) while taking these years to do Clojure. I got the impression he had been thinking about it for a while prior and that it was in the neighborhood of two years. (The context was, he was thanking his wife for helping to make Clojure possible, in part by indulging in many converstions about very minute details of how Clojure would work.)

(I have no idea if this is covered in the paper as it's 46 pages, I've bookmarked it but not yet read it.)

In those 46 pages, he goes into details regarding how the idea came up to him, why he took a sabbatical of 2 years (which ended up lasting to this day, he says at the end :D ), what he did during those 2 years (not only Clojure) and how he basically has no retirement savings left because of that.

There was also a group of people who wanted to see Clojure succeed who donated money ($100 each, if I recall correctly). But I would guess that was a drop in the bucket compared to what he had to spend of his own money.

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