Rich Hichey

When he came out with Clojure and his very first video lectures, I studied MIT Scheme and Common Lisp by reading the classic books.

Being still a green amateur I intuitively realized very quicky that he just ripped off all the principles behind Scheme and some of Common Lisp, reshuffled, and put together as something of his own invention. Yes, I was naive and amateur, I told you.

So, I just dismissed him as yet another narcissistic asshole and moved on, largely ignoring the actual details of what he was saying.

Today I’ve understood that I was simply unprepared to that kind of presentation and joggling with familiar principles and classic concepts.

He is right, you like it or not, and he did what he did - restated old principles from Functional Programming in Scheme and Imperative in Common Lisp, added some common sense and repackaged it as a simple ( presumably done just right) language for the JVM platform to hide behind proper classic abstractions and techiques the fucking degeneracy of the Java language and imperative OOP in general. I have understood this much back then.

Today I would say that I really appreciate that he have done what he preached. The Datomic database (of all things) has been developed on the principles and using the language based on these principles, and it is a success. Immutability and persistence wasn’t just memes.

This is actually big. This re-qualifies Rich from just a narcissistic asshole who loves to hear his voice, to a successful designer and architect similar (but obviously inferior) to Joe Armstrong, who is a real icon.