From watching the screencasts that Hickey produces for Clojure - he talks about working on a 'Real Time Broadcasting System' (National Election data streaming).

From watching the screencasts that Hickey produces for Clojure - he talks about working on a 'Real Time Broadcasting System' (National Election data streaming). It sounds like he spent lots of time thinking about how to guarantee what a real-time system would do when reporting on snapshots data as it was streaming through. The ideas in Clojure and Datomic seem to be the result of that thinking process. (ie in Datomic you have the ability to go back and see what the state of the system was at that point in time. In Datomic the agent model gives you the ability to see the state of a value in the middle of an STM transaction.)