That's right, I have a blog post cooking up about why Electric is for experts today. A major factor in this is because, like with Clojure, the users aren't paying us, so the documentation you want cannot yet afford to exist. Another is performance - to get Electric to purr you have to understand what you are asking the computer to do (I've seen the stuff senior engineers type with their AI codegen tools, that approach is simply not viable here, at least not yet). The net impact of these two factors is that if Electric is not obviously the exact thing you know you must have—i.e., you are already succeeding or have the possibility of succeeding with something else—there is high risk that your adoption will not succeed, leaving you frustrated and unhappy! Failed projects do neither of us any good, that is a recipe for a damaged brand.
A bonus third factor is that the demos we've been cooking up internally—that we haven't revealed yet—are so f%cking incredible that everyone is going to be motivated to use and learn it anyway because Electric yields value that is previously unseen and unavailable anywhere else. So I am simply setting healthy expectations for success. For example, we just built the 80% that matters of the “sync engine” value prop in two weeks and 100 LOC. Implementing it in userland requires 1 LOC per query. With differential network traffic for over the wire O(1) remote incremental collection maintenance! for free! And the pattern works with any database!
> Electric looks awesome, but their stern warning of “we are building this for ourselves, and if you get value that’s great” gave me pause.
Clojure (the core language) is developed in exactly the same way, Rich Hickey is pretty forthcoming with the approach they take. So if a framework with that approach gives you pause, probably Clojure the language should do the same. Relevant: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
But I know Clojure is in use in quite a few places, and it has quite a few really capable people supporting it in one way or another. Plus it has good documentation and several books teaching it. That's very different from a slick (and impressive) framework built by one company for themselves.
Also, code written for Electric is very specific to Electric. But Clojure is just functional-first Lisp. It's very easy to rewrite in another language, even an imperative language. There wouldn't be a huge paradigm shift translating Clojure to any of half a dozen popular languages.
Clojure not developed in the same way - it's really conservative about backwards compatibility and puts a lot of thought in existing users. Electric is still making backwards incompatible changes, in contrast.
You're probably thinking about the open source community developed project vs "it's not a democracy" aspect where Clojure is definitely in the latter camp.
"Each tenancy gets the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free to create Ampere A1 Compute instances. This free-tier usage is shared across Bare Metal, Virtual Machine, and Container Instances."
For block storage:
"Block Volume service Free tier allowance is for entire tenancy, 200GB total/tenancy. If there are multiple quotes for the same tenancy, only total 200GB can be applied"
In other words: you have a 4-core ARM CPU + 24GB RAM + 200GB space for free.
Yep, I was running one of these for the longest time.. until they blocked idle instances! Hah.. thats the kind of usage free gets you, lot of people hoarding it for... nothing. I mean, I could easily have thought of stuff to load the instance up slightly but, eeh.
You can also add an extra 50gb of space to pay like $5/month, that way you are paying and it is still an insanely better deal than any of the other cloud providers
I find this bid for cross-platform recognition somewhat schizoid given that Swift isn't even backwards compatible on Mac OS. I has to upgrade to Ventura a while back just to get Swift regexen working.
This is somewhere that Swift is better on non-Apple platforms. You have to upgrade macOS to get Swift bug fixes because the runtime is part of the OS, while on other platforms it’s a separate thing that can be upgraded on its own.
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