"Simple Made Easy" - Rich Hickey (2011)

Why HN readers recommended it

It is one of HN's most frequently recommended programming talks, cited whenever people debate complexity, simplicity and abstraction, and valued well beyond Clojure.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

ClojureTV

Topic

software complexity and design

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

9

HN mentions in dataset

17

Recommendation years in dataset

2021–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• Simple Made Easy ( [VIDEO] ) The Language of the System ( [LINK] ) The Value of Values ( [LINK] ) All by Rich Hickey (Clojure creator) - strongest programming speaker I've found to date.

• I highly recommend Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk as a way to think about software complexity. We all know that complex systems are hard to work with, but I've found his presentation very useful in understanding the nature of complexity. Understanding complexity helps being …

• Actually Rick Hickey's talk ( [VIDEO] ) is amazing because he talks about your case by going back to the original meaining of words: ,,Complex comes from the Latin complecti, which means “to entwine around, to embrace'' Simplicity requires layering, so in your examples the …