Clojure has gained a lot of positive attention in recent years, and a significant contributor to this has been the medium of video. Rich Hickey (Clojure’s creator) has proved himself to have a talent not only as a great language designer but also as a great speaker on complex technical subjects, which I think has contributed in no small part to Clojure’s early success.
Here are a selection of videos by Rich that I personally found very insightful and think are worth watching for anyone interested in Clojure:
- Are we there yet? – a 2009 talk challenging the object-oriented way of thinking about concurrency and state, and presenting the Clojure approach as a viable alternative.
- Clojure Concurrency – great talk that starts with an introduction to the language, has some deep discussion on the concurrency aspects of Clojure and builds up to the famous “any colony” simulation.
- Clojure for Lisp programmers – quite an advanced talk (since it is aimed at people with an existing Lisp background), has a lot of insight on Clojure’s design decisions as a language. This talk is in two parts, you can see the second part here
- Persistent Data Struture and Managed References – a fairly technical video explaining Clojure’s approach to immutablility and the management of identity, state and values over time. This was the video that first got me interested in Clojure.
- 2011 Clojure/conj keynote – Talk on Clojure development direction and new features. Lots of insight on the design decisions that need to be made by language designers.
- Simple made easy – a recent video by Rich that highlights the difference between “Simplicity” and “Easiness” in software design (and why Clojure is right to focus on the former first and foremost). Greatest moment – introducing the term “complect” to the Clojure lexicon.
- The Design of Datomic – here Rich talks about his latest project, the Datomic database. In some ways Datomic is what you get when you design a database around Clojure’s core principles.
Creative Clojure 
Had you seen my list of Clojure-related videos: http://alexott.net/en/clojure/video.html ?
I’m trying to collect videos of talks/screencasts, etc. Feel free to submit more as comment to this page
Hi Alex – thanks for the link – that’s a great collection and I see I have some more viewing to do!
It already looks pretty comprehensive but I’ll certainly be happy to let you know if I find any others not on your list.
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