Reflect On Your Habits (A Review of Rich Hickey's "Are We There Yet?" Talk Part 1)
Channel: Brent Millare
Date: 2023-10-26

#programming #problemsolving #philosophy 
We need to have times of reflection in order to make progress on things of habit.

A recurring theme in my experience is we get used to our pain points,
like how we acclimate to a bad smell over time. Only after returning
to the room, after stepping outside, do we realize how bad it smells.

Yet we don't truly believe that the way we do things are perfect or
flawless. So therefore, we can pose that Object Oriented Programming
can have both good and bad aspects, even if we are numb/blind to its
faults. So how can we identify its faults?

Back in 2009, 14 years ago, Rich Hickey gave a talk: "Are we there yet?",
on how we treat "time" in OO langs. Not "time" like with
clocks or dates, but with respect to the nature of process and
change. I watched the talk as part of my journey on learning the
motivations behind Clojure, the programming language. Like many of his
talks though, his ideas have applications outside of just Clojure. So
I, only later after grad school and industry experience, did I
appreciate all the nuggets in his talk. In this
episode, I'll review his points, and reflect on them, based on my
experience and my review of the current software landscape today.

Original Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScEPu1cs4l0