Thanks swyx again for sharing your insight in this space.
I closely followed your work while you were at Temporal. "React for Backend" resonated with what I experienced while building couple of systems in the backend!
It's been a year or two since then, and I'm frankly surprised that Temoporal-like services don't appear that mainstream. At least in my small circle friends, orchestration framework is still in the "early adopter" stage of innovation.
Any recent take on the adoption of Temporal-like frameworks? Do you still believe it will have a React like moment in the future?
> I'm frankly surprised that Temoporal-like services don't appear that mainstream. At least in my small circle friends, orchestration framework is still in the "early adopter" stage of innovation.
yup and the problem is in both demand and supply. it is still too difficult to get up and running (whether with temporal or orkes or other) and also not enough developers realize the business value of/(difficulty of doing well) doing long running async work (i tried to communicate that in all my temporal intros, but getting devs to care about what code has abnormal biz value is surprisingly difficult, only a minority look at code like that).
further - choreography (as referenced in my article) will always be simpler to start with than orchestration, so many people will start there first and basically stop there. so the activation energy to feel the pain is nonzero.
that said, we have evidence that app developers will eventually be convinced to overcome learning curves and shift work left, with typescript released in 2012 but only "winning" in 2018-19. there was no React "moment", it grew and grew through the work and advocacy of a small group of believers and the fortunate self immolation of Angular 2
Thanks - just reading the article that you linked to above on your website. It seems like a very similar concept to state machines; can you help me wrap my head around how this might play with something like xstate or that concept?
Yes, but the article also says that file is generated by a makefile from more than a hundred .c and .h files, and that it's done for ease of distribution and because optimizers do better with a single compilation unit.
It's not like the authors spend a lot of time working on the amalgamation and that's the way the project is developed.
Fascinating - I am the exact opposite! I've found that for reading fictions - a narrative that mostly move forward - the limition of eink displays in freely flipping between pages to be less annoying.
Well, the article itself is not discussing the merits of Kindle Voyage so the comment looked out of place for me. And certainly marketing via internet comments is a thing, even on HackerNews. I think it's called "integrated" marketing, or whatever the current newspeak for that one is. Regardless my comment was mostly made tongue-in-cheek
What led you guys to work on this problem? What inspired you guys?