But.... Rich is pushing things a little too far I believe.
On the front page of the Clojure web site, under the section 'Rationale", his very first 6 words are:
> "Customers and stakeholders have substantial investments [...]"
Those words do not sit well with (from the rant):
> "[..] you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation."
I get it, Rich is making a point, and its a fair and unarguable one - if he indeed has no loyalty or feeling whatsoever towards said Customers and Stakeholders.
But in the real world, we want our work to be valued by others, and I'll bet that the stewards of Clojure feel just the same and maybe shudder just a little.
When he talks about customers and stakeholders, he is talking about people who have bought in to that design. It is very easy to support his position here. Rich knows exactly how he wants to program and the man is a visionary of data-driven programming and thinking. If you don't like that vision, maybe don't use Clojure and find a different lisp.
Great design is a very foreign idea to a lot of mainstream software developers - most of them, sooner or later, go for the "big rewrite" because they didn't get the design right to start with. Things like Python 2 -> 3 spring to mind (breaking changes to print! whoever thought that was a good idea didn't respect the language users). With that rational, he is promising not to do exactly what the Python people did.