Stewardship: The Sobering Parts
Brian Goetz·2014·Clojure Conj·1 hrBrian Goetz on what it's like to evolve Java for nine million developers — where the real constraints come not from type theory but from compatibility, mental models, and the slow patience of language design.
Spec-ulation
Rich Hickey·2016·Clojure ConjHickey on versioning, breaking changes, and the quiet violence we do to downstream users when we 'fix' our APIs in place.
Design in Practice
Rich Hickey·2023·Clojure ConjAfter years of talking about design in the abstract, Hickey demystifies the actual practice — the concrete moves and habits that turn 'design' from a noun into a verb.
Maybe Not
Rich Hickey·2018·Clojure ConjHickey takes aim at Maybe/Optional and the conflation of optionality with absence — arguing that wrapping types is the wrong place to encode 'I might not give this to you.'
Effective Programs — 10 Years of Clojure
Rich Hickey·2017·Clojure ConjRich Hickey on what a decade of Clojure has taught him about the kinds of problems most production code is actually trying to solve — and why static type systems aren't the answer he keeps hearing about.
The Wet Codebase
Dan Abramov·2019·DeconstructAbramov on what DRY actually costs once you've lived with a too-clever abstraction — and why writing the same code twice is sometimes the right answer.
Growing a Language
Guy Steele·1998·OOPSLAGuy Steele's celebrated keynote — delivered using only one-syllable words at first — on what a language must let its users extend.