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:
I make no claims to novelty, and the blog post does link to http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Enumerator_and_iteratee, the most similar work and a clear influence. If more people knew about Iteratee, it would be worth spending more time talking about the connections and contrasts, but they don't, and knowledge of it is not prerequisite to understanding reducers. No one helped me write the code.
Isn't foldr/build fusion much closer? A collection is represented by a "build" function that takes the reducer, and list transformers become reducer transformers. The main difference is that it's applied automatically by list library using rewrite rules, so it's not as obvious, the reducer is supplied as a pair of "cons" function and "init" value rather than a variadic function, and there's no parallel fold.
When working up from the bottom it might seem that this is just manual stream/list fusion. But the parallelism is the key prize. We need to stop defining map/filter etc in terms of lists/sequences, and, once we do, there is nothing to fuse, no streams/thunks to avoid allocating etc, because they were never essential in the first place, just an artifact of the history of FP and its early emphasis on lists and recursion.
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.
This can't really be true because there has never been anything "clear" about enumerators and iteratees. Maybe a dozen people understand what's going on there.
Also, most of what's special about enumerators is the gymnastics needed for Haskell's type system, which isn't relevant to Clojure at all...
This is a blog post, not an academic paper with citations. It's about conveying a message: "Here's this new thing I made. You can use it. Here are it's pros and cons."
One of the nice things about Clojure is that it's a lot of great ideas from a lot of great people, packaged up with Rich Hickey's particular brand of digestible design.
Having watched most of Rich's published talks, it's apparent to me that he is quite humble about the fact that none of his ideas are that novel. He simply takes credit for this particular arrangement and takes pride in his design approach. His design sensibilities really resonate with a lot of people, hence Clojure's popularity.
On a personal note, I wish I could give credit to all the giant's whose shoulders I have stood on. However, it's simply not possible to remember all those details. Sometimes, ideas take days, weeks, months, YEARS to bake. Sometimes, someone tells you the solution to the problem, but you don't get it. Then 5 years later, it comes to you in a dream.
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.
You dont want to use a language where people build the most awesome thing they can think of? The people are all about building cool stuff but if you ask any of them what is bad you will hear them becoming very very critical.
Do you expect Rich or anybody else to write a blogpost that goes 'I wrote this library and here is why it sucks'. EVERYBODY writes blogpost on why what they themselfs build is good, I dont see any diffrence between clojure and other languages (or communitys).
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