Many of us see Clojure's appeal as connected to avoiding tying things together unnecessarily. Don't complect, compose, etc as in the famous Rich Hickey talk (https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...).
In Why is Jepsen written in Clojure?matthiasn
talk-transcripts
Languages & Compilers2014–2026
matthiasn / talk-transcripts
talk-transcripts
Transcripts of Clojure-related talks
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Transcripts of Clojure-related talks
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This is tangentially related to Puzzles-vs-Problems in Rich Hickey's Effective Programs > Eventually I got back to scheduling and again wrote a new kind of scheduling system in…
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Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:58:02 AM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by year102 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-10-30 13:16:39 UTC to 2026-09-04 09:57:52 UTC.
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 2 | 11 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 9 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 5 | 7 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 1 | 10 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 2 | 6 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 1 | 12 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 2 | 4 |
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talk-transcripts
This is a compilation of transcripts of talks that I find interesting. I learn better when I read something rather than hearing it, and I have a hunch that I'm not the only one who feels that way. So I thought I'd make the talks more accessible to anyone for whom listening to the talks might not be the most viable or simply not the most preferred option.
Please, if you read any of the transcripts and find that a URL is mentioned in the talk and you go look it up, can you submit a pull request turning that into an actual link in the transcript? It is really simple, just click on the pencil button above the document and turn the mention in the text into a markdown-style link like this: **[blah.com or whatever was in the transcript](http://blah.com)**. Thanks, you're making the transcripts more useful.
For more information on this project, please read this blog post.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
13 sources> What kind of runner can run as fast as they possibly can from the very start of a
race?
> [Audience reply: Sprinter]
> Right, only somebody who runs really short races, okay?
> [Audience laughter]
> But of course, we are programmers, and we are smarter than runners, apparently, because we know how to fix that problem, right? We just fire the starting pistol every hundred yards and call it a new sprint.
https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
In Can't be fucked: Underrated cause of tech debtNow, of course, everybody is going to start moaning, "But I have all this speed. I'm agile. I'm fast. You know, this easy stuff is making my life good because I have a lot of speed."
What kind of runner can run as fast as they possibly can from the very start of a race?
[Audience reply: Sprinter]
Right, only somebody who runs really short races, okay?
[Audience laughter]
But of course, we are programmers, and we are smarter than runners, apparently, because we know how to fix that problem, right? We just fire the starting pistol every hundred yards and call it a new sprint.
https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
In Can't be fucked: Underrated cause of tech debtConsider reading/watching Rich Hickey's talk Effective Programs [0][1] and Maybe Not [2][3]
In [0] in particular there're slides 22/23, here is part of the transcript but makes more sense with the slides on:
> And you can call them problems, and I'm going to call them the problems of programming. And I've ordered them here [...] I've ordered them here in terms of severity. And severity manifests itself in a couple of ways. Most important, cost. What's the cost of getting this wrong? At the very top you have the domain complexity, about which you could do nothing. This is just the world. It's as complex as it is.
>
> But the very next level is the where we start programming, right? We look at the world and say, "I've got an idea about how this is and how it's supposed to be and how, you know, my program can be effective about addressing i
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t". And the problem is, if you don't have a good idea about how the world is, or you can't map that well to a solution, everything downstream from that is going to fail. There's no surviving this misconception problem. And the cost of dealing with misconceptions is incredibly high.
>
>So this is 10x, a full order of magnitude reduction in (?) severity before we get to the set of problems I think are more in the domain of what programming languages can help with, right? And because you can read these they'll all going to come up in a second as I go through each one on some slide so I'm not going to read them all out right now. But importantly there's another break where we get to trivialisms of problems in programming. Like typos and just being inconsistent, like, you thought you're going to have a list of strings and you put a number in there. That happens, you know, people make those kinds of mistakes, they're pretty inexpensive.
[0] Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU
[1] Slides and transcript: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
[2] Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5WdGrpoug
[3] Slides and transcript https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
This is tangentially related to Puzzles-vs-Problems in Rich Hickey's Effective Programs
> Eventually I got back to scheduling and again wrote a new kind of scheduling system in Common Lisp, which again they did not want to run in production. And then I rewrote it in C++. Now at this point I was an expert C++ user and really loved C++, for some value of love. But as we'll see later I love the puzzle of C++. So I had to rewrite it in C++ and it took, you know, four times as long to rewrite it as it took to write it in the first place, it yielded five times as much code and it was no faster. And that's when I knew I was doing it wrong.
[...]
> So I mean for young programmers, if everybody's tired and old, this doesn't matter any more. But when I was young, when I was young, I really, you know, when you're young you've got lots of free space.
Read the rest
I used to say "an empty head", but that's not right. You've got a lot of free space available and you can fill it with whatever you like. And these type systems they're quite fun, because from an endorphin standpoint solving puzzles and solving problems is the same, it gives you the same rush. Puzzle solving is really cool. But that's not what it should be about.
Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU
Slides and transcript: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
Using triggers + history tables (aka audit tables) is the right answer 98% of the time. Just do it. If you're not already doing it, start today. It is a proven technique, in use for _over 30 years_.
Here's a quick rundown of how to do it generically https://gist.github.com/slotrans/353952c4f383596e6fe8777db5d... (trades off space efficiency for "being easy").
It's great if you can store immutable data. Really, really great. But you _probably_ have a ton of mutable data in your database and you are _probably_ forgetting a ton of it every day. Stop forgetting things! Use history tables.
cf. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
Do not use Papertrail or similar application-space history tracking libraries/techniques. They are slow, error-prone, and incapable of capturing any DB changes that bypass your app stack (wh
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ich you probably have, and should). Worth remembering that _any_ attempt to capture an "updated" timestamp from your app is fundamentally incorrect, because each of your webheads has its own clock. Use the database clock! It's the only one that's correct!
Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) references Polya several times in his classic talk "Hammock Driven Development". Here's a transcript:
https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
I've long been impressed by Hickey's problem solving skills, so I took much of this talk to heart, and even bought a copy of HTSI. Can't say it really helped me any more than Rich's talk (as a programmer) but I'm thinking I'll give it another look.
In How to Solve It (1945)>Great product designs require no manual, and similarly, great interfaces need no documentation. Imagine having to read a manual on how to use a coffee mug.
This could not be more wrong.
Not everything is easy. If a library is addressing a complicated domain, solving by definition a complicated problem, it is fine if it requires some learning.
When did expertise and learning become bad things? If software is an engineering discipline, why would people in it ever promulgate the idea that any random cog can step in to any “engineer”s shoes?
Rich Hickey analogizes this mentality to the world of music, where it taken for granted that learning an instrument requires a lot of study:
“ We start with the cello. Should we make cellos that auto tune? Like, no matter where you put your finger, it's just going to play something good, play a good note
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.
“[Audience laughter]
“Like, you're good. We'll just fix that.
“ Should we have cellos with, like, red and green lights? Like, if you're playing the wrong note, you know, it's red. You slide around, and it's green. You're like, great! I'm good. I'm playing the right song. Right?
“ Or maybe we should have cellos that don't make any sound at all. Until you get it right, there's nothing.
“ [Audience laughter]”
https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
If something can be made easier without undermining its integrity, great. Not everything can be made as easy as drinking from a cup, something most 3 year olds can handle. If you think hitting dot in your IDE and choosing among the options is as much as you should be required to learn, you are asking to use NERF toys instead of power tools. Sometimes you need to read things, welcome to adulthood.
https://youtu.be/aSEQfqNYNAc
The full video:
[Time 0:49:06] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSdnJDO-xdg
Transcript here: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
In Datomic is FreeRich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk discusses value and time - how mutability ties these together such that value is always time-dependent - and the complexity that results.
https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
In All programming philosophies are about stateFunctional Core, Imperative Shell[1] is one of the most useful patterns. I will probably use it in every future project. Two major production projects that use FCIS are:
- ReactJS: https://svitla.com/blog/functional-programming-in-typescript
- CodeMirror/ProseMirror: https://codemirror.net/docs/guide/
Another functional concept I find very useful is immutability. Immutability "clicked" for me after watching this talk[2]. I wish immutability was a first-class concept in JS/TS. (It will be, eventually.[3]) For now, I use immer.js for immutability in JS.
In retrospect, my programming naturally tended to be "functional-esque. Now I do it very deliberately, even though the language isn't purely functional (JS/TS).
[1]: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/18043058
[2]: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
[3]: https://fjolt
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The value of values: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
Having values and having your program phrased as transformations of values makes for straight forward, easily tested code. Provide inputs, assert outputs.
In Ask HN: How has functional programming influenced your thinking?