I may be able to answer your question. I only watched the video on the landing page and glanced at the docs, but it reminds me of what a saga system would do (like redux-saga perhaps), meaning that much of the side effects, such as networking, are abstracted away from the business logic, and there is the concept of compensation when things don't go as planned. Very neat!
yeah, "saga for the backend" is an appealing angle to some folks (eg our Coinbase testimonial has that) but i'm not sure how many developers know about sagas so I've been hesitant to push that too hard (bc then we'd have to teach people an extra concept before they get to us).
i'd say something that is maybe hard to appreciate until you really get into it is just how much goes into making this ultra scalable with distributed transactions. If you have ~20 mins for it, I wrote this up recently: https://docs.temporal.io/blog/workflow-engine-principles
Not hard at all to appreciate. I know the consistency woes of juggling thousands of message queues with millions of messages and containers with enormous databases. The problem though, as I found out ironically, is that most dilbert bosses don't appreciate solutions like temporal, unless a tech "guru" tells them about it. For example, I get laughed at when I tell other developers that databases are an antiquated idea and should be avoided in general.
What I've been working on in recent years is actually not too far off in terms of how to approach making truly simple code, but is far off in the sense that it'll take me (alone) years to make a pragmatic implementation, probably as a language in its own right. Rather than attempt to make a system partition tolerant I started thinking what if network partitions were assumed as the default? To answer that question you have to do things like measure the information entropy of data, use knot theory, representation theory such as young lattices, symmetric group mapping, character groups, prime number theory, among other goodies, to represent event-states, workflows, etc. Most of all (this is where things get weird) is rather than code programs, the emphasis becomes how to easily declaratively code and build "homotopic" multiplexed protocols instead (while keeping the business logic familiar), that way SDKs and integrations are a thing of the past. All this has of course has to use existing web standards like HTTP, otherwise it won't be adopted. My friend always laughs at me when I try to explain it to him, so I apologize, ha. But that's all the more reason to appreciate technology like temporal because it's something a developer can use today.
