Comment by Scarbutt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Scarbutt | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, and that's exactly why Nubank acquired Cognitect. They are too deep into the tech to migrate to something else, cheaper to just buy the authors.

So you have deep technical debt with serious scaling issues and bugs everywhere(Datomic/Nubank) and a burnout company(Datomic/Cognitect) get together, makes sense.

Burnout because their "Datomic Cloud" product didn't worked out, it was just a horrible complex AWS cloudformation template that force you to click through tens of aws webpages. It was more complex to manage and to dev for than on-premise but you still had all the same issues and bugs.

Nubank got into Datomic not because of Clojure, but the other way around, they got into Clojure because of Datomic. If you watch their videos, the reason they picked Datomic was because they think it had "time travel", which is quite different from having "history" of transactions, use mostly for auditing and troubleshooting, not for real time travel queries.

In the end, I guess things did work out for Cognitect, and Hickey is now laughing all the way to the bank.

I have being following Datomic for a year because of a system I inherited.

This seems like an excessively uncharitable read of the situation. I've never used Nubank's software, but I have used (on-prem) Datomic and I certainly wouldn't say it has bugs everywhere. In fact, in my (admittedly low-volume and simple) usage of the system I haven't come across any bugs I can remember. Calling Cognitect a "burnout" company is inaccurate and rude.

I agree with you that the Datomic cloud stuff comes across as being frighteningly complex. I think they probably just need to work on the documentation, like making it more obvious what the differences and tradeoffs are between the deployment scenarios.

Did you inherit a Datomic system that was previously developed by a small team or a small company? Because inheriting a system that's hard to understand and change transcends languages and databases. It is the tie that binds us all as software developers.

I hit this bug: https://docs.datomic.com/on-prem/changes.html#0.9.6021

Not being able to perform writes to your database is not scary enough? it's funny how they phrased that bug.

Also hit 4-5 more that are there in the change log, let serious but still pretty bad and frustrating.

This was a internal application, the DB was not being stressed, a 4KLoC readable Clojure codebase.

Don't get me wrong I really like Datomic and its features but the implementation still has a long way to go.

Fair enough, hitting that bug would have pissed me off too.

On your last point, I agree that it still has a way to go. It's good for some (many?) production use cases now, as Nubank's success demonstrates, and hopefully with Nubank's resources it'll start to live up more to its promise.

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