On: Rich Hickey: Deconstructing the Database

[erikpukinskis]

Fascinating stuff. Some things that came up for me while watching this and the other videos on their site[1]:

It's not Open Source, for anyone who cares about that. It's interesting how strange it feels to me for infrastructure code to be anything other then Open Source.

I'm sort of shocked that the query language is still passing strings, when Hickey made a big deal of how the old database do it that way. I guess for me a query is a data structure that we build programmatically, so why force the developer to collapse it into a string? Maybe because they want to support languages that aren't expressive enough to do that concisely?

[1] http://www.datomic.com/videos.html

[jkkramer → erikpukinskis]

You are not forced to pass strings. That's merely a convenience (for Java). You can construct and pass data structures instead.

[nickik → jkkramer]

Yes, and in clojure you acctually use data literals not just strings.