Rich Hickey

Rich Hickey is a computer programmer and speaker, known as the creator of the Clojure programming language.

Rich Hickey in San Francisco

Biography

Clojure is a Lisp dialect built on top of the Java Virtual Machine.^[1][2] He also created or designed ClojureScript and the Extensible Data Notation (EDN) data format.

Before Clojure, he developed dotLisp, a similar project based on the .NET Framework.^[3] Hickey has also worked on scheduling systems, broadcast automation, audio analysis and fingerprinting, database design, yield management, exit poll systems, and machine listening.^[4]

He spent about 2½ years working on Clojure, much of that time working exclusively on Clojure without external funding, before releasing it to the world in 2007. In 2012, Datomic, a proprietary distributed database was launched which coincided with the incorporation of Cognitect.^[5] From 2013 until 2020, he was the chief technology officer of Cognitect.^[5] Cognitect was acquired by Nubank in 2020, and he was a Distinguished Engineer at Nubank until August 2023 when he announced^[6] his retirement from commercial software development.

Papers

• Rich Hickey (February 1995), "Callbacks in C++ using template functors", C++ Report, 7 (2): 43–50. Reprinted in Stanley B. Lippman, ed. (January 1996). C++ Gems: Programming Pearls from The C++ Report (SIGS Reference Library). pp. 515–537. ISBN 978-1-884842-37-5.
• Rich Hickey (June 2020), "A History of Clojure", Proc. ACM Program. Lang 4, HOPL, Article 71