And Hickey himself said he adapted ideas from Bagwell's HAMTs. And tries are 60 years old.

I have always thought Hickeys main contribution was making it default in a coherent way, and proved it could be done. Before clojure most peoplle still thought immutable data structures were too I practical.

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swannodette 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's a big contribution, also the original HAMTs are not a functional data structure. See Section 3.4.1 in https://docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/3386321-trk2f.pd...

	▲	bjoli 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		No, but persistent bit partitioned tries were pretty well known in the late 90s (I first met them in standard ML in 2005)

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panick21_ 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the Clojure version does have some actual improvements over the Bagwell version, and some implementation tricks improvements as well. But I don't remember all the details.

	▲	bjoli 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well, sure. But it is not like Hickey invented the 5bit partitioned trie (there is work in sml and Haskell before that), nor did he invent functional tries. He took what was a research topic and made it standard. There were no other 5bit partitioned tries in (wide) use. I think he did that in a way that signals a fantastic sense of taste, and if you are implementing a programming language you need taste.