[augustl]

I've used Datomic from both Kotin and Groovy (!)

I presented on Datomic at KotlinConf too, with some live coding starting around the 31 minute mark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hicQvxdKvnc

You probably need to be on the JVM, as the peer library (i.e. the "good one", where you embed the full query engine and data fetching directly into your business logic) is so far only implemented for the JVM.

I suppose 10+ years of weird license models and a hefty price tag haven't helped. Datomic turned free (but still proprietary) in 2023 though. But why Datomic isn't more widely adopted is a huge mystery to me...

[foobarian]

> But why Datomic isn't more widely adopted is a huge mystery to me...

I've been hearing about Datomic on and off over the years, and I never saw a clear answer to the simple question: what is it? What does it do?

Instead I saw it most often mentioned as an example of a successful Clojure project, and now that's how I think of it. Seems like poor marketing/branding if there ever was intentional attempt at it.

[diggan]

> I've been hearing about Datomic on and off over the years, and I never saw a clear answer to the simple question: what is it? What does it do?

I'm guessing most people, like me, first heard about both Clojure and Datomic from one of Hickey's famous talks about software development. Coming from one of those, I guess it's a bit easier to understand what the various concepts and words mean from Datomic's website for example.

I guess the easiest way to put it: Datomic is a append-only (deletions via "retraction" records) database that lets you query through time (also called "Bitemporal modeling" with fancier words).

The features/benefits page I think is pretty clear (https://www.datomic.com/benefits.html) but again, might just be my familiarity speaking.

[michaelteter]

Thanks. I’ll check out the video.

At this point I’m pretty addicted to BEAM and the Elixir ecosystem though. (And LiveView!).

[macintux]

I doubt it's still the case, but once upon a time Riak (written primarily in Erlang) was one of the preferred storage backends for Datomic.