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We are very open in the post that the core concepts are not new: Individually, none of these concepts are new. I’m sure you’ve seen them all before. You may

We are very open in the post that the core concepts are not new: Individually, none of these concepts are new. I’m sure you’ve seen them all before. You may be tempted to dismiss Rama’s programming model as just a combination of event sourcing and materialized views. But what Rama does is integrate and generalize these concepts to such an extent that you can build entire backends end-to-end without any of the impedance mismatches or complexity that characterize and overwhelm existing systems. Indexes as arbitrary data structures that you shape to perfectly meet your use cases, a powerful computation API that's like a "distributed programming language", and everything being so integrated make a world of difference. I understand the desire to see all the code, and that's coming in two weeks. That said, the code in the post isn't trivial as it's showing almost the complete implementations of two major parts of Mastodon: the social graph and timeline fanout. Next week you'll be able to play with Rama when we release a build of it, and the documentation will help with that.

Aeolun 3y ago
> But what Rama does is integrate and generalize these concepts to such an extent that you can build entire backends end-to-end without any of the impedance mismatches or complexity Every time I hear this the reality turns out to be that building anything with this tech is like building something on top of SAP. But I’m also just allergic to any post that says ‘look how amazing’ in general, so I’m a bit prejudiced.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  After reading through the post a bit more, I’m inclined to believe it’s not hot air, but I think most of the innovation where is in the management layer, not the ease of application development. Just looking at the first example tells me that there’s a million ways someone that doesn’t know what they’re doing can mess this up. If the author of the platform implements some service on their own platform it’s always going to seem simple.

Aeolun 3y ago

> But what Rama does is integrate and generalize these concepts to such an extent that you can build entire backends end-to-end without any of the impedance mismatches or complexity Every time I hear this the reality turns out to be that building anything with this tech is like building something on top of SAP. But I’m also just allergic to any post that says ‘look how amazing’ in general, so I’m a bit prejudiced.

Aeolun 3y ago
After reading through the post a bit more, I’m inclined to believe it’s not hot air, but I think most of the innovation where is in the management layer, not the ease of application development. Just looking at the first example tells me that there’s a million ways someone that doesn’t know what they’re doing can mess this up. If the author of the platform implements some service on their own platform it’s always going to seem simple.