From the description:
Rich Hickey’s second, “philosophical” talk at the first Clojure Conj, in Durham, North Carolina on October 23rd, 2010.
The presentation reminded me of this story in Peopleware (p. 67):
In my years at Bell Labs, we worked in two-person offices. They were spacious, quiet, and the phones could be diverted. I shared my office with Wendl Thomis who went on to build a small empire as an electronic toy maker. In those days, he was working on the ESS fault dictionary. The dictionary scheme relied on the notion of n-space proximity, a concept hairy enough to challenge even Wendl’s powers of concentration. One afternoon, I was bent over a program listing while Wendl was staring into space, his feet propped up on the desk. Our boss came in and asked, “Wendl! What are you doing?” Wendl said, “I’m thinking.” And the boss said, “Can’t you do that at home?”
If you liked that story, you will like the presentation.
Everything that is said about software development is directly applicable to authoring topic maps and standards.