Interesting that you name them 'together'. On the surface, they are doing quite different things. On a deeper level, it seems to me, they approaching things in a very similar manner. I think what they share is a style of work very detached from the hectic, local improvement approach, which is usually forced upon us in industry for efficiency reasons. They inspiringly take their time to dig deep to identify hidden assumptions to get to the root causes of problems. Quite in the sense of the artist or scientist Bertrand Russell thought of. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1948_re...

At a deeper level they are both pragmatic philosophers. They think at a high level but they are hands-on and have their feet firmly on ground realities. Inventing on principle is Bret Victor's contribution, but Rich Hickey surely lives it; and Hammock-Driven Development is Rich's notion, but there wouldn't be "Inventing on principle" without HDD on Bret's part. These two are awesome.

And both will be at Strange Loop this year! http://thestrangeloop.com/sessions

Strange Loop is a very hot ticket. I tried to get a ticket w/ company support within 6 weeks of the early admission offer... no luck, the conference was sold out. I'm happy to see such a heavily tech-focused conference doing so well. I'll be looking to get an very early ticket next year.

Strange Loop is such a great conference. I wish there was something like that here in Europe.

What about Devs Love Bacon? http://devslovebacon.com/

The clojure crowd seems to be filled with it. And they even attract gurus like oleg kiselyov. Most of their lectures are worth the time entirely.

One of the reasons I've adopted Clojure (for small things... so far...) is the high density of very smart folks using it and building it.

I did too until I realized I wasn't ready for so much lispiness, too abstract for me right now.

"too abstract" is not a phrase I'd think to associate with a lisp. It's all just data. If anything I'd expect people to say there's too little abstraction.

But the right amount of macro and alternative design can throw a noob off quite easily. Beside that I agree with you.

Wholeheartedly concur. I'm also a fan of Rob Pike's straightforward way of "getting to the core" of quite tricky concepts and putting them forth in such a way that they become obvious. Pike's razor, perhaps?

Can you recommend a Rob Pike lecture? :)

I enjoyed this one about using message passing functions to compose a lexical scanner in go

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxaD_trXwRE

Everytime I watch "Inventing on Principle" I learn something new. Are there any other great Bret Victor talks available that the community would suggest?

Or Rich (Value of Values, Simple Made Easy ...) for that matter.

For Rich, two of my favorites are:

Are We There Yet http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic...

Clojure Concurrency http://blip.tv/clojure/clojure-concurrency-819147 These early videos of Rich demoing his little project have such a cool feel. There are several more on the blip.tv account.

And in addition to the two you mention and these are good:

Hammock Driven Development http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586

Clojurescript http://blip.tv/clojure/rich-hickey-unveils-clojurescript-539...