bjaress's comments

First, thank you for implementing and promoting this approach to collections.

I did see that link, because I liked the concept enough to read it all the way through without knowing Clojure, but that's not quite what I had in mind. You're right that most people have never heard of that library, which is why the way you presented it will leave most people with no idea that it was an influence (even if they read that far). That's something you could have just said, in one sentence, without getting into detail about how it was different.

I'm not really trying to criticize you for saying or not saying certain things, and I don't think you did anything wrong. Not really acknowledging influences is just a symptom of what turned me off. I feel like this post was written from a sort of aggressive fighting-for-popularity mindset that I'm uncomfortable with in a language.

EDIT: missing word

Fair enough and absolutely true in principle, but I don't think "here are its pros and cons" is the message being conveyed.

Rich Hickey might be very humble in person, and I don't think this blog post is necessarily arrogant (but you're also not going to convince me it's humble).

I'm not really complaining about a lack of humility or even about Rich Hickey. I just feel like Clojure is one of those languages caught up in a sort of Cult of Awesomeness, where people feel obligated to lionize the pros and downplay or omit the cons and the contributions of others.

I don't really want to use a language that's being driven by that. Maybe I'm mistaken about Clojure fitting that description, and maybe meeting Rich Hickey would set me straight, but I still think it's a reasonable perception to take away from this blog post.

It seems like everything I read about Closure gives me a reason to use it, but a slightly stronger reason not to.

I'm happy to see a language putting this approach to collections into its core libraries and even combining it with ideas about parallel processing of data structures.

On the other hand, the whole thing is written as if Rich Hickey had an awesome idea, wrote some awesome code, and is now sharing his awesomeness with us. It's kind of a lost opportunity to give credit to the people who gave him the ideas (and maybe the people who helped him write the code, if there were any) and it's kind of a turn-off.

One good, prior write-up about reducing as a collections interface is:

http://okmij.org/ftp/papers/LL3-collections-enumerators.txt

I think computer models just mean you do replication the other way around. Of course anyone who runs the same program gets the same results, so ordinary replication is pointless--instead you answer the same question with a totally different program and see if your answer is close.

And then, of course, you wait and see if the predictions of the models come true. You can't reset the world and re-test it, but you can re-run the models and ask for more prediction in the future and wait some more.

Climate scientists do both of those things all the time because they're in one of the most heavily scrutinized fields.

Isolating variables just means you compare two setups with everything the same except one. That's actually one of the things the models are for. You can't re-run the world without humans, but you can re-run the model with humans turned off.

Then someone else can do the same with their totally different model. And if both of your answers match reality with humans on and each other with humans off, well maybe the difference between humans on and humans off is the impact of humans. Or maybe not. But adding more different models helps.

In short: climate science generates testable hypotheses, does replication, and isolates variables. It's possible they're wrong (and publishing source code is a good idea) but they don't have a methodology problem. And they're probably right.

Also, Michael Crichton basically wrote Hollywood scripts in novel form. He's not a good source on anything.

He set up separate hosting for some static splash pages and got some information for us from vendors.

I never did get a clear explanation of his role, and he stayed at another site with the project manager, so I really don't know how much work he did, only that I didn't see him do very much.