Rich Hickey: "Simple Made Easy" from Strange Loop 2011 [video]

For me this was the best talk I've seen in a long while. It reminded me of how I felt when I first read PG's essays, someone articulating your own suspicions whilst going further and deeper and bringing you to a place of enlightenment and clarity. BTW for those of you who haven't watched it, this talk is not Clojure specific.

Normally I am opposed to chronic reposting but I have watched this video start to finish 5+ times and it has never been time wasted. It is an eloquent expression of a philosophy that has shaped how I approach problem-solving more than any other. If you've never watched it, you're doing yourself (and those who depend on your ability to efficiently and effectively solve problems) a disservice.

Simple Made Easy is a great introduction to the Rich Hickey Fanclub [1] ;) Other recommendations for early viewing are "Hammock Driven Development", "The Value of Values" and "The Design of Datomic". [1] https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub

Fantastic talk, covering the difference between “simple” and “easy”, and how (when you can’t have both) the former is preferable. I find it interesting that Python, despite being widely described as a simple language, takes the opposite approach. The language isn’t simple at all [0], it prefers to make things easy. This preference even appears (in the contrapositive) in the “Zen of Python”: “Complex is better than complicated.” As a specific example, Python 3.7 introduced dataclasses, making them dependent on…