Rich Hickey Asserts Artifacts Over Constructs

The aim of this page📝is to note the tool-fetish spread among programmers as per Rich Hickey’s observation, from the talk Simple Made Easy.

1. notes

• We program with constructs
• We have programming languages
• We use particular libraries
• Those things have certain characteristics in and of themselves.
• But we’re in a business of artifacts
• We don’t ship source code
• The user doesn’t look at our source code and say, “Ah, that’s so pleasant.”
• The user runs our software, and they run it for a long period of time
• Over time, we keep glomming more stuff on our software
• All of that stuff:
• the running of it
• the performance of it
• the ability to change
• it all is an attributes of the artifact — not the original construct
• But again, here we still focus so much on our experience of the use of the construct
• Oh, look; I only had to type 16 characters
• Wow! That’s great
• No semicolons … or things like that
• This whole notion of sort of programmer convenience, again, we are infatuated with it: not to our benefit

2. sources

talk-transcripts/SimpleMadeEasy.md at master · matthiasn/talk-transcripts