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Rails Conf 2012 Keynote: Simplicity Matters by Rich Hickey

Confreaks · 220.1K views · 2012-05-01 · 36:53

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Overview

Rich Hickey's keynote at RailsConf 2012, a close sibling of his 'Simple Made Easy' talk. He distinguishes simple (not intertwined) from easy (familiar), and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things, with Rails-specific examples including large gem collections.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as an alternative or companion to 'Simple Made Easy', and quotes its ideas about simplicity, complexity and 'hairballs' in discussions of frameworks, JSON and data design.

Recommended by 8 HN people across 8 months · HN mentions 2015–2024

Topics

Software architecture & designFunctional programming
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rich hickeysimple vs easycomplexityclojurerails

What people said

stcg · 2023-04 · Strong recommendation

Related: the great and timeless talk called "Simplicity Matters" by Rich Hickey - [VIDEO] (By the way, any talk by Rich Hickey is worth watching)

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tosh · 2020-01 · Recommendation

another angle: while Clojure is a Lisp with its own distinct flavor it gives you … * a large community of practitioners and professionals (great for asking questions, finding collaborators, …) * easy access to libraries in the js/jvm/.net ecosystems * a style that relies more on data and transformations of data (illuminating simplicity) in any case: it is worth digging deeper, one thing that kept me away was not knowing where to start (analysis paralysis). in hindsight picking any Lisp would have been great (instead of postponing). Find a thread and start pulling :) Rich Hickey’s talks were a great entry point for me [LINK] e.g. [VIDEO] (the “Simplicity Matters” keynote at Rails Conf 2012) edit: Land of Lisp is a great book as well

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cutler · 2019-08 · Recommendation

Clojure is by far the best programming language I've ever used. Rich Hickey's Sermons On The Mount changed the game of programming once and for all. With Clojure you could finally have your Lisp cake and eat it. Witness the sheer chutzpah of the guy when he basically told Ruby devs they were doing it wrong at Rails Conf in 2012 ( [VIDEO] ).

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Sources

Video by Confreaks, played through YouTube.

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