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Comment by michaelteter | Hacker News Reader

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.

If it reaches a point of being documented and intended for general public use, then I’ll definitely try a project with it.

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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.

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