The Value of Values with Rich Hickey

What people said

elamje · 2021-10 · Strong recommendation

Simple Made Easy ( [LINK] ) The Language of the System ( [LINK] ) The Value of Values ( [VIDEO] ) All by Rich Hickey (Clojure creator) - strongest programming speaker I've found to date.

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josephg · 2020-09 · Strong recommendation

Most software isn’t FAANG. In the long tail of database size, I’d guess 95%+ of databases are smaller than a few hundred megs. And at that size, storage is cheap and storing a full historical record of changes should absolutely be the default. Rich Hickey has a great talk on this a few years ago talking about the difference between Place and Value. He says accountants learned this lesson hundreds of years ago with bookkeeping. Users just don’t generate much data relative to the size of our disks. Well worth a watch, especially if you disagree: [VIDEO]

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lukifer · 2020-04 · Strong recommendation

Immutability has been pretty hot of late, though still controversial. There are several popular languages which encourage or even force immutability (Elixir, Clojure). What sold me on the idea was Rich Hickey's talk, "The Value of Values": [VIDEO] I look at it as mostly a safety net: I'd rather use const by default, unless I have a good reason to be able to mutate the variable. (To flip it around: what problem does being mutable-by-default solve?) 9 times out of 10, I don't need to change the value for the lifecycle of the function; and often if I do, the code is cleaner anyway if I use an immutable pattern (such as `const foo = bar.map()` rather than `for(x in bar) foo.push()`). Thanks to the magic of Merkle trees, we can generally make fresh pointers without it costing much memory overhead.

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