BTW for those of you who haven't watched it, this talk is not Clojure specific.
I'd be interested in seeing someone present a different and convincing set of concepts. At this point, I think Rich has put together a very good toolset.
Non-Clojure examples would help make the point. He does bring up examples from Haskell (such as type classes) in the talk in places, but doesn't dive deeply into them.
I would love to see the programs that are generated from this philosophy.
I find it a little funny sometimes to hear all these "web scale" folks put down SQL, and then praise something like MongoDB because you can do map/reduce.
I saw a presentation by the author of the Lift framework in Scala and he made a bit of a joke saying "gosh...all this FP stuff...the folks who created SQL heard about that a long time ago".
the only person out there who thinks
SQL has a certain beauty and elegance
On the subject of SQL and Clojure, ClojureQL provides an alternate relational data manipulation language that compiles to SQL. It's not just a different syntax; it allows some composability not found in SQL. The syntax does help though, especially in conjunction with the thrush operator.
If you liked this talk, then you will definitely like "Are We There Yet?" In it, Hickey argues that most popular object-oriented languages make similar mistakes by bundling identity, time and state into objects. He discusses how we might simplify programming by separating these components and rethinking each.
It has a similar theme but focuses on one concrete issue in depth. It has a similar philosophical style while remaining clear-headed and practical. And, in my opinion, it is similarly enlightening. If you couldn't tell by now, I recommend it :)