Composition shouldn't be this hard
cambra.dev
Composition shouldn't be this hard
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: Composition shouldn't be this hard
#2If code > infra (wrt 'elegance' or whatever we're talking about), then just use code. I.e. build a monolith (or monoliths) as far as is practical.
Re: Composition shouldn't be this hard
#3This resonates a lot if you’ve ever worked in system integration.
In practice, most of the complexity comes exactly from what’s described here: every system has a rich internal model, but the moment data crosses a boundary, everything degrades into strings, schemas, and implicit contracts.
You end up rebuilding semantics over and over again (validation, mapping, enrichment), and a lot of failures only show up at runtime.
I’m skeptical about “one model to rule them all”, but I strongly agree that losing semantics at system boundaries is the core problem.
Re: Composition shouldn't be this hard
#4Oh good
Re: Composition shouldn't be this hard
#5The proposition reminds me of Rama by Red Planet Labs: https://redplanetlabs.com/
Re: Composition shouldn't be this hard
#6This sounds a lot like the original vision of darklang: https://darklang.com
Re: Composition shouldn't be this hard
#7If code > infra (wrt 'elegance' or whatever we're talking about), then just use code. I.e. build a monolith (or monoliths) as far as is practical.
right, I think DHH's "Majestic Monolith" is another good approach here
Re: Composition shouldn't be this hard
#8Ok this was a nice read. Very expressive and I agreed with the majority of the points.
I'm not going to lie, I expected "and this is why we built ", but it never came.
Which leads me to my question, and forgive me for my impatience, but _what_ are you selling? Is it a platform? Ide? Books? So many words and I ended with more questions than I started.
On any who, good read indeed.
Re: Composition shouldn't be this hard
#9This reminds me of Rama [1] from Red Planet Labs
[1] https://redplanetlabs.com/programming-model
> What is Rama? Rama is a platform for building distributed backends as single programs. Instead of stitching together databases, queues, caches, and stream processors, you write one application that handles event ingestion, processing, and storage.
Re: Composition shouldn't be this hard
#10> "we believe advances in programming language theory and database systems have opened a path that wasn’t available before"
Which is tantamount to waving one's hands about and saying there's "New magic!(tm)"
... while standing next to a pile of discarded old magic that didn't work out.
This blog post says nothing about what makes Cambra's approach unique and likely to succeed; it is just a list of (valid) complaints about the status quo.
I'm guessing they want to build a "cathedral" instead of the current "bazaar" of components, perhaps like Heroku or Terraform, but "better"? I wish them luck! They're going to need it...