wotbrew's comments

Mainly it is because the tar pit paper proposed the relational algebra in its functional relational programming.

I do think for some it might be easier to reason mechanically about dataflow through collection-oriented operators. But I suppose it's subjective.

clj-3df [1] to my understanding does something like Relic for datomic datalog using differential dataflow.

Disclaimer: I now work on XTDB [2], so datalog is somewhat now my day job.

[1] https://github.com/sixthnormal/clj-3df

[2] https://xtdb.com/

A big part of the curse of lisp is that anything feels possible. Even for one guy who works at a veg shop.

A relic db is a persistent data-structure [1]. Applying a transaction with rel/transact gives you a new database, rel/track-transact also returns the changes to relations you have opted-in to change tracking (using rel/watch).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure

Ahhh... a fellow traveller on the road.

I have been hacking on a Clojure/Script library (https://github.com/wotbrew/relic) to experiment with exactly this kind of thing. / PLUG

For most problems I encounter I want to focus on the data and its relationships.

I cannot help feeling like programming languages and idioms have me deal with too much 'mechanism', the machine like structures and forms that are mostly incidental to the data domains I work in, and are entirely about performance, layout, access pattern etc - when a machine could do an ok job of making those decisions for me until optimisation becomes important.