For me this was the best talk I've seen in a long while. It reminded me of how I felt when I first read PG's essays, someone articulating your own suspicions whilst going further and deeper and bringing you to a place of enlightenment and clarity.
BTW for those of you who haven't watched it, this talk is not Clojure specific.
However it's a great advertisement for Clojure, since the set of things he highlights as enabling simplicity is pretty much a subset of Clojure (or included libraries, like core.logic).
I'd be interested in seeing someone present a different and convincing set of concepts. At this point, I think Rich has put together a very good toolset.
Well, yes, IIRC he described one of his major goals with Clojure as enabling simplicity, or something like that. That Clojure's design follows his views on simplicity seems natural.
Non-Clojure examples would help make the point. He does bring up examples from Haskell (such as type classes) in the talk in places, but doesn't dive deeply into them.
Your comment made me take heart if I understand it correctly. Sometimes I feel I'm the only person out there who thinks SQL has a certain beauty and elegance.
I find it a little funny sometimes to hear all these "web scale" folks put down SQL, and then praise something like MongoDB because you can do map/reduce.
I saw a presentation by the author of the Lift framework in Scala and he made a bit of a joke saying "gosh...all this FP stuff...the folks who created SQL heard about that a long time ago".
I think the relational model has beauty and elegance, but not the SQL language itself. They are not one and the same.
On the subject of SQL and Clojure, ClojureQL provides an alternate relational data manipulation language that compiles to SQL. It's not just a different syntax; it allows some composability not found in SQL. The syntax does help though, especially in conjunction with the thrush operator.
If I'm not mistaken he also mentions LINQ wich is a wonderful extensions of C# and the .NET Framework. It feels like LINQ and Clojure could be a interesting match.
If you liked this talk, then you will definitely like "Are We There Yet?" In it, Hickey argues that most popular object-oriented languages make similar mistakes by bundling identity, time and state into objects. He discusses how we might simplify programming by separating these components and rethinking each.
It has a similar theme but focuses on one concrete issue in depth. It has a similar philosophical style while remaining clear-headed and practical. And, in my opinion, it is similarly enlightening. If you couldn't tell by now, I recommend it :)
BTW for those of you who haven't watched it, this talk is not Clojure specific.