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Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

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Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#3
I love Datomic, think it can be revolutionary and use it in my side projects. I understand their need to make a living off of their (brilliant, unique) labor and so keep it closed source. But the big bananas at my company are reluctant to try something so different. With Clojure I can push them over that hump since it's open source. But they are not willing to introduce proprietary lock-in of such a fundamental piece to an otherwise OSS stack so Datomic is out.

It would be nice if Cognitect could do even better with a Red Hat business model, selling support for an open source product. I don't know if that is plausible for Datomic or not. I suppose that's a function of how popular an open source version would be compared to the current version, and I can't even guess.

If Ions is successful enough that could be their profit source, allowing them to set standalone Datomic free.

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#4
post #3

I love Datomic, think it can be revolutionary and use it in my side projects. I understand their need to make a living off of their (brilliant, unique) labor and so keep it closed source. But the big bananas at my company are reluctant to try something so different. With Clojure I can push them over that hump since it's open source. But they are not willing to introduce proprietary lock-in of such a fundamental piece…

My current job (primarily a Java shop on the backend) is the first where I've been able to introduce a little Clojure after years of having it relegated to being my 'side project' language.

Datomic looks neat from a distance, but not being open source means I'm probably not even going to look at it (since I wouldn't be able to use it in any case).

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#5
post #4
post #3

I love Datomic, think it can be revolutionary and use it in my side projects. I understand their need to make a living off of their (brilliant, unique) labor and so keep it closed source. But the big bananas at my company are reluctant to try something so different. With Clojure I can push them over that hump since it's open source. But they are not willing to introduce proprietary lock-in of such a fundamental piece…

My current job (primarily a Java shop on the backend) is the first where I've been able to introduce a little Clojure after years of having it relegated to being my 'side project' language. Datomic looks neat from a distance, but not being open source means I'm probably not even going to look at it (since I wouldn't be able to use it in any case).

There’s an open source ‘version’ of datomic with a lot of the same features (Datalog, immutability, as-of queries etc) called Crux, I’ve played around with it on side projects and think it’s pretty awesome

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#6
I love Clojure and like Datomic, but that thing needs some documentation. Really good documentation. I think that is one of the main reasons why it didn't achieve much penetration for something so good. Be different if you must, but document. Look at something like Kafka, where every little thing is documented. You can find documentation for every shell script! that ships with it, not to mention excellent api docs. They also specify how the clients work in detail, not to mention how Kafka works. With datomic, even though everything works well, most of the time I feel like I am driving blind. I don't know if something I wrote works in every case.

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#7
post #4
post #3

I love Datomic, think it can be revolutionary and use it in my side projects. I understand their need to make a living off of their (brilliant, unique) labor and so keep it closed source. But the big bananas at my company are reluctant to try something so different. With Clojure I can push them over that hump since it's open source. But they are not willing to introduce proprietary lock-in of such a fundamental piece…

My current job (primarily a Java shop on the backend) is the first where I've been able to introduce a little Clojure after years of having it relegated to being my 'side project' language. Datomic looks neat from a distance, but not being open source means I'm probably not even going to look at it (since I wouldn't be able to use it in any case).

Amazing how the world has changed. Not too long ago it was hard to introduce code that wasn't closed source.

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#8

I love Clojure and like Datomic, but that thing needs some documentation. Really good documentation. I think that is one of the main reasons why it didn't achieve much penetration for something so good. Be different if you must, but document. Look at something like Kafka, where every little thing is documented. You can find documentation for every shell script! that ships with it, not to mention excellent api docs. T…

Having great documentation would mean less sales in support contracts.

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#9
post #3

I love Datomic, think it can be revolutionary and use it in my side projects. I understand their need to make a living off of their (brilliant, unique) labor and so keep it closed source. But the big bananas at my company are reluctant to try something so different. With Clojure I can push them over that hump since it's open source. But they are not willing to introduce proprietary lock-in of such a fundamental piece…

While it isn't the same https://juxt.pro/crux/docs/index.html is a good compromise in the space and is open source albeit a very freshly released project. One of the major blockers I had to adoption, needing Kafka, is no longer an issue with the release of https://github.com/juxt/crux/tree/master/crux-jdbc. A great starting point if anyone wants to check Crux out at a distance is https://nextjournal.com/crux-tutorial, starting https://nextjournal.com/crux-tutorial/start

Re: Rich Hickey on Datomic (2012) [video]

#10
Having dealt with Datomic at work I really have come around to the way thinking that Datomic promotes. Having history that you can query along with having datalog and a graph database as opposed to a relational database has its benefits.
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