The Value of Values with Rich Hickey

Rich Hickey's "Value of Values"[0] is what finally sold me on the benefits of pure functional programming and immutable data structures. (It remains horrifying to continue working with MySQL in my day job, knowing that every UPDATE is potentially a destructive action with no history and no undo.) [0]: [VIDEO]

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.

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]

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.

If you have the slightest interest in the issue of concurrency then you should study Erlang and Clojure. Since Moore's Law has largely faded, and we now gain speed by putting more CPUs in each server (rather than having the individual CPUs be faster) concurrency is an increasingly unavoidable aspect of programming. Joe Armstrong (Erlang) and Rich Hickey (Clojure) have both spent an enormous amount of time thinking about how to support concurrency in a programming language. Armstrong talks about a paradigm that he calls "Concurrency Oriented Programming". Armstrong's thesis is surprisingly readable and I recommend it: [LINK] Rich Hickey's video presentation "The value of values" is also a good overview of some concepts that are important to Functional Programming: [VIDEO]

Hi! I have been a programmer for a couple years and started picking up clojure after watching a few of rich hickeys talks. This is the one that best satisfies your question, imho: [VIDEO]

It's funny how catnaroek was completely vendetta-downvoted in this thread for speaking valid things. For those who don't understand the difference between objects and values, this video may be of help: [VIDEO]

That talk was "The Value of Values," which I enjoyed as well. Links for anyone interested: [LINK] (1 hour version) [VIDEO] (1/2 hour version)