The Value of Values with Rich Hickey

In this keynote speech from JaxConf 2012, Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure and founder of Datomic gives an awesome analysis of the changing way we think about values (not the philosphoical kind) in light of the increasing complexity of information technology and the advent of Big Data. The broad subject of the talk makes it worth watching for almost anyone in the programming world, and was one of the highlights of the JaxConf lineup.
If you like the talk, check out Hickey's other appearance at JaxConf2012 here: marakana.com/s/rich_hickey_on_...

[@fxbehr]

Rich Hickey is a genius. The Lisp and Java Communities are listening to him. I don't know anyone else who accomplished this before him.

[@greenfloatingtoad]

Interestingly, a lot of the Java designers were big names in the lisp world, like Guy Steele.

[@defnlife1683]

@@greenfloatingtoad he co-designed Scheme, which is awesome!

[@ChristopherOkhravi]

Almost 5 years later... still extremely interesting. Thank you :)

[@daveachuk]

Funny thing about functional programming: it seems it only gets more relevant with time. For example, everyone in the client-side web world is totally into React now. React is basically this presentation in JS form.

[@timv6141]

This talk is so on point.

[@jav20a]

Awesome talk. Thanks Rich.

[@WasifHasanBaig]

A very insightful talk.

[@ws9691]

I wasn't expecting much.. but @16:56 was really eye opening!

[@fengzhou6884]

When memory increases 1 million fold, everything will change! Nice talk!

[@mitchellhendrix]

Really fascinating

[@awright18]

The door is wide open for people to kick the competitions ass by using things like clojure and datomic to make simple systems that are easy to change and maintain, and truly transform the industry. This is still true today many 8 years later. We work around the OO ideas and PLOP ideas and give our customers slow expensive systems. Its ridiculous.

[@viebel]

Great talk! Are the slides available somewhere?

[@nirgle]

Great talk!

[@diegonayalazo]

Thanks for sharing

[@CalvaTV]

I felt uncomfortable with that Facts slide this time. Last time I saw this talk, I didn't think much about that slide. Was more wondering where it was going. Then it took me a while to understand where it has gone. Wonderful talk! Very valuable.

[@arikc5201]

Very insightful talk. I'm defintely sold on immutability.

[@leocrapart6521]

Immutably sold on immutability

[@theory816]

sweet hair

[@CarlosSaltos]

by the way, thanks for the keynote, it's AMAZING !! (Y) :)

[@kris1227]

Hears how to use this object on a napkin lol. Love Rich Hickey.

[@kevincasey2036]

lol @ 18:21. Visible involuntary shudder at the thought of xml.

[@DanHaiduc]

"I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. But whatever floats your boat."

[@itellyouforfree7238]

still, current computing machines are place based (memory addresses, registers) and mutability is required somewhere along the chain to achieve decent performance

[@Bestape]

The namespace is place. But hopefully it's legoland with moduled chains.

[@MattClimbs]

I don't understand how a value is 'semantically transparent'. Perhaps if that value has a label then it could convey the meaning of the value but without it isn't a value just data without any meaning? For example, Rich says a string is a value if it's immutable and comparable. So the string "as23casd" could be a value, but what's its meaning? How is it 'semantically transparent'?

[@prabhugopal]

@Matthew Cochrane, What Rich refers here is "value" = " immutable data/value", example : { String JUNK= "as23casd"; } not the name or label. were in java except String, other types are by default mutable. to keep it simple if you alter/modify a String in java actually the old memory is dissociated, a new memory is created & associated to "JUNK". But this is not case with int, long, etc.. where the same memory is used but value is altered. Imagine "JUNK" is using memory address 0x6677 initially, after modification you may see different memory address 0x7788. But say, int i=0 and it got memory address 0x7878 ; now if we update with i++ or i=20, we will see same memory address after our update. If you ask why it matters, in concurrency immutable data helps avoid race condition & other problems while sharing data in multiple threads. So your value is "semantically transparent" with immutable data or value but with mutable date or variables (here variable mean not the name or label) you loose the transparency if any thread can modify it.

[@emeka1978]

Rich knows how to sell its products. I would love to see Dr Tarver do the same for Shen.

[@mikejanzen9014]

So true: 15:40-16:10

[@mateusvahl5072]

so true: 00:00 - 31:34 xD

[@Bergerons_Review]

So troll ;)

[@citiblocsMaster]

10:52 Rich doing the datomic logo with his hands, so your subconscious thinks it's great

[@JaihindhReddy]

I lost it LMAOOO

[@sripasum3122]

More like functional programming by wittgenstein

[@Gennys]

If a string is mutable it's still a value... I"m so lost,if that's the presupposition that we're relying on.

[@MadaraUchihaSecondRikudo]

It's not, it's a place, or a collection of places, which stores a value, but what's stored in the place can change, and so you can look at the same string at two different points in time, and see two different projections of the values stored inside.

[@mfreeman451]

aha nice

[@jymer2000]

Because the man doesn't want to let anything go to garbage collection.

[@jymer2000]

This guy should be on hoarders...

[@mfreeman451]

lol why?

[@user-dh2sd4sj2f]

I, for one, would not like my future information systems to constantly consume more and more space because they "produce new facts". This is exteremely expansionist view of the world that assumes resources to be inifinite and infinitely cheap. Yes, the memory doesn't just "replace" something with something else in the "same place" - no, it, in fact, frequently "writes" other random and usually unrelated facts. Because space is not infinite, neither in memory nor in informations systems. Our own universe is the only thing known to man which resembles any kind of infinity properties, and even this might just be tricks our reasoning methods play on observed world.

[@willmcpherson2]

As he said in the talk, we have garbage collection for memory and we'll probably get garbage collection for persistent memory as well. The brain does this. It's less "space" and more "space for all intents and purposes".

[@CarlosSaltos]

Space ? ... in Spanish a direct translation sounds limiting, weak ... how about Cosmos, or Universe ... the Universal Age !! ... la Era Universal !! ... WOW !! ;) :)