ClojureTV
14 HN recommenders · recommended in 16 months, 2018–2025
1:03:29 · 181K views · Nov 30, 2018
Rich Hickey's Clojure/Conj 2018 keynote argues that Maybe/Option types and rigid type signatures are a poor way to model data that changes over time. He builds the case around optionality, schema growth and compatibility, and presents the ideas behind Clojure spec as an alternative.
HN commenters send people to it whenever nulls, Maybe/Option or static typing come up, as a thoughtful dissent from the type-system orthodoxy that changes how some people model data.
20 comments from Hacker News
I bounce back and forth between TypeScript and Clojure. I've been keeping a close eye on Clojure's upcoming spec as it seems to be a nice opt-in, run-time type-checking solution. I like the flexibility and quickness with which dynamic languages let me iterate, but I want the safety. I want at least some of the benefits of both. So yes, they (dynamically typed languages) have some advantages. Sometimes when I'm iterating quickly, especially on new projects, I don't want to fight with the compiler. BUT, I vastly prefer TypeScript to JavaScript because JS has a lot of foot-guns. I think when we get the existential operator, it will have less foot-guns, but I will probably never again write a new project for work in JS from scratch. I really love the ideas Rich Hickey put forth in his most recent Clojure conj talk: this video The ability to spec out the shape of an object, and then in the different contexts in which you need some of that data, specify what you need, is an awesome solution to optionality (Watch the talk!). I absolutely love how much thought RH has put into the design of Clojure, and I think the final release of spec will be a close to perfect balance of dynamism and opt-in safety. Of course, TS is a superset of JS, so adopting it little by little sorta gets me that balance I want.
My mind blown experience was listening to a Rich Hickey talk (maybe not [1]) that flipped upside down my accepted method of thinking about types and type system paradigms. I still love writing Haskell and Rust, but I see the warts that he is so concisely pointing out. The either type really sticks out to me now, and I see the problems with overtyping what are essentially maps, and how rigid that makes every aspect of your programs. Currently I deal with a fairly large go monolith that had some clean code practices in it, and changing a single field that is going to make it into the public API ends up being hundreds or thousands of lines of changes. Such a waste of time to CRUD what is a map of strings. 1. this video
While we're talking about this conference, rich hickey just changed how I think about domain modelling forever with this talk, released about an hour ago: this video Strongly recommend a watch particularly if you're modelling something in a typed language
Rich Hickey's "Maybe Not" should be watched by anyone who thinks nulls/nils/undefineds are okay. It should also be watched by anyone who think that Optional/Maybe/Nullable and good enough: this video
"Maybe Not" by Rich Hickey: this video Another excellent talk by the creator of Clojure, and like the previous ones, relevant for all programmers.