It took more than ten years of full-time work for Rama to go from an idea to a production system. I shudder to think of how long it would have taken w

Rama is a testament to the power of Clojure

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2024-04-30 19:00:11

It took more than ten years of full-time work for Rama to go from an idea to a production system. I shudder to think of how long it would have taken without Clojure.

Rama is a programming platform that integrates and generalizes backend development. Whereas previously backends were built with a hodgepodge of databases, application servers, queues, processing systems, deployment tools, monitoring systems, and more, Rama can build end-to-end backends at any scale on its own in a tiny fraction of the code. At its core is a new programming language implementing a new programming paradigm, at the same level as the “object-oriented”, “imperative”, “logic”, and “functional” paradigms. Rama’s Clojure API gives access to this new language directly, and Rama’s Java API is a thin wrapper around a subset of this language.

There’s a lot in Clojure’s design that’s been instrumental to developing Rama. Three things stand out in particular: its flexibility for defining abstractions, its emphasis on immutability, and its orientation around programming with plain data structures. Besides these being essential to maintaining simplicity in Rama’s implementation, Rama also embraces these principles in its approach to distributed programming and indexing.