There was a lot of crypto-adjacent talk in earlier versions of their marketing and product design. Without it actually being anything actually crypto-adjacent. Analogies drawn to ethereum etc concepts, I guess because they figured somehow there was an audience that would get those references and it would allow them to understand the product better?

I have no idea why. I was hired to work on very early versions of it, and left very early on in part because I wanted nothing to do with that angle. IMO it's a liability.

It had nothing to do with marketing, it was because conceptually stored procedures are similar to smart-contracts and share technical aspects. We thought engineers would find the similarities interesting. Instead they immediately assumed we were shilling tokens, so we pulled it down.

Kind of sad that people can't see past that, but I also understand. It is what it is.

Hey Tyler; looking back I think maybe a better language than "reducers" etc would have been to just something analogous to the ECS term "systems", which I understand to be "processes that operate on entities / components" and always seemed overly general and non-specific to me but at least is familiar to game programmers operating in data driven design.

You may recall I was partial to the term "verb" :-)

I think that's very fair, we've got quite a lot of momentum behind reducers at this point though. That doesn't make it a good, name but it is a sticky one.

"mutation" may also have been a good choice?

Oh it's you! Sorry cmrdporcupine! I didn't see.

I feel like they've been inspired by crypto for the way they handle billing. They sell you "Energy" which you use by running on their infra. Seems like a needless abstraction to me.

Doesn't Snowflake do something similar though?

And Vercel's "compute units"

They do indeed.