Never let HN haters (among whom I am frequently numbered, it ought to be noted) get you down.
After skimming a bit of the differential dataflow writing I am really impressed. This is deep computer science doing what it does best, which is to do much more with much less.
I’m glad to hear it! One of my favorite ways to view Materialize is as bringing differential dataflow to the masses. Differential dataflow is deep, elegant stuff, but it requires some serious CS chops to grok.
SQL is lacking in elegance but abundant in popularity. Building the SQL translation layer has been a fun exercise in bridging the two worlds.
Efficiently maintaining views over arbitrarily complex computations is one of the two hard problems in computer science for a reason [0].
[0]: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html