To me this seemed insane. The idea that I would use some pricey consumption based cloud think rather then using a systemd service or docker container locally to do most of my development is crazy. I don't want to deal with Amazon accounts authentication, VPC and all that other jazz just to start with a tiny project.
Even outside of the other stuff you mentioned.
> Also, the Java API had poor adoption.
They also put no effort into it. We use JOOQ, and I don't see why a JOOQ like API for Datomic wasn't doable. With the existing Java API, no wonder no Java shop would use it.
Not having a simple Docker container I can run and connect to a Spring Boot project within 10 minutes, so that my Java colleagues could use it, made it a a complete non-starter.
> In the end, Cognitect chose to spend their lives doing something hard that matters, and I deeply respect that.
Truly building something that really, really matters requires large adoption. And it seem to me every move they made was the opposite.
I can understand not going open-source, but honestly, to get really adoption, real wide traction, you need to be open and be well integrated into Java/PHP/JS and Python. And it seem to me they never really cared about that much at all.
> but honestly, to get really adoption, real wide traction
> they never really cared about that much at all.
It's all a matter of perspective. Rich been really upfront with that both Clojure and Datomic are products of Rich's solution to particular problems he experienced.
Datomic does really, really matter, even with the "small" adoption it has, for me. Even if I haven't used it myself a lot. And who are anyone of us to say what "truly matters" when it comes to how we spend our time? Clearly, Datomic does matter, otherwise these people wouldn't have spent a decade building it, so it does matter on some level.
Maybe that doesn't match up to your "truly, really, really matters" imagination, but it feels kind of weird to reach the conclusion that Datomic doesn't matter, based on what you believe to be impactful.
Ideas can live on beyond what the original projects carry, which is clearly the case with Datomic, and with basically any project (so far) Rich decided to work on.
Interesting framing. The people behind Clojure and Datomic aren't known for being amazing at scaling and shipping products (i.e. marketing and all that jazz).
This is also not me judging them for it, I haven't built and shipped a Datomic, much less marketed it.
The problem with Cloud was that it didn’t deliver on easy. It was not the Heroku they envisioned, rather it was a scary AWS amalgamation that required deep AWS knowledge to debug their CloudFormation templates to get it to work. This is not even really their fault!, as CloudFormation is a dumpster fire, there are much better cloud orchestration tools now. And while AWS's first few products were rock solid (S3, EC2, DynamoDB), around this time is when AWS turned on the enterprise growth machine and pivoted into box checking and everything cloud began to turn to quicksand underneath their feet.
On top of cloud quicksand, Datomic Cloud had technical scalability challenges which they brute force engineered through, motivating the architectural shift away from the easy synchronous/local entity api to the annoying async/remote client api, and then back again sorta with Ions -- but at the cost of, like, 3 years of product roadmap, during which time Typescript exploded in popularity, the serverless hype cycle began to break and SQL started making a comeback.
Also, the Java API had poor adoption. selling predominantly into Clojure commercial users isn’t a great market so consequently: no VC, small team, no sales/marketing/devrel - at a time when the startup boom was gaining momentum, developer infra was getting funded for the first time so competitors were spending tons of money on beautiful docs, marketing, full time twitter accounts, etc.
I still think there’s elements of an amazing product here, but the business window for a Clojure database has kinda closed - because Clojure itself has lost momentum. Datomic Cloud at its essence is a clojure hosting platform, the business is Clojure itself. I am very bullish on Clojure, I think it never found its killer app, and once found, once a money vector is opened, a bunch of cash (like, $100M†) will make all these problems go away and deliver on Clojure's mission to bring "simple made easy" to mass market application development, which is desperately needed. Maybe Hyperfiddle & Electric?
† Paraphrasing a Materialize press release, “it takes $100M to build a production ready database” -- and for the record, Materialize isn't doing too well, nobody seems to know what it is for and the VCs replaced the CEO earlier this year. Full quote: "Why did we raise $100M? Put quite simply, we believe this is the order of magnitude of investment that it takes to build a production-ready database. Databases are notoriously hard to get right, and we do not intend to cut any corners."
In the end, Cognitect chose to spend their lives doing something hard that matters, and I deeply respect that.