Rich Hickey on Clojure

Rich Hickey is the creator of the Lisp programming language: Clojure (first version in 2007). The 22th of March 2010, he was interviewed on the Software engineering radio (radio dedicated to professional software developers).

In this episode, Rich Hickey tells us that he did not start programming with Lisp, but with famous programming languages such as C++, C# and Java. Lisp is not new, it has been used in some domains successfully (in artificial intelligence for example) but don’t have a main stream. In respond of this, Rich Hickey says that Lisp was not designed as a main stream language and that it was designed for super users, researchers and very smart people who wanted to solve very hard and different kind of problems. Furthermore, programming has become like a social activity: More and more people are using Lisp, but nowadays most of the users are still scientists and researchers.

However, for Rich Hickey: « every programmer with a good open mind will find working with the Lisp ». This affirmation is very encouraging for us, beginner programmers and shows that the target audience of Lisp can become very large if we continue to teach and promote this programming language.

Why Lisp is difference from other languages? Lisp compiles data structures and not text.

Lisp is a language where the structure of program code is represented in a standard data structure: Lisp functions can be manipulated or even created within a Lisp program without lower-level manipulations. This characteristic is one of the main advantages of the language. Rich Hockey also says that all the data (such as primitive variable references, lists, arrays and hash tables) are mutable by default, so that nothing can prevent someone from changing the value of a variable, an element of a sequence or a field of a structure.

Dick Gabriel’s interview compared to Rich Hickey’s interview was a little bit more convincing, Dick Gabriel convinced me better about the usefulness and possibilities of Lisp (in my opinion, Rich Hickey went too far in the details).