The creator of Apache Storm spent 10 years building this new programming paradigm

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]My name is Nathan Marz. I'm the founder of Red Planet Labs. I've been programming Clojure primarily for 15 years. I've done a whole lot of projects in Clojure, the most notable which is Storm, which became very widely used even well outside the Clojure community.

[00:00:13]I've also done a bunch of other projects in Clojure like Cascalog and Specter.

[00:00:17]And then for more than 10 years I've been working on something called Rama.

[00:00:21]So Storm I started working on in 20 10. I was working at a startup called BackType. And it just was to fill a need that we had. We needed to do real-time processing of data at scale with strong guarantees on the processing of data. The big lightbulb moment was I figured out a really clever algorithm that could guarantee that the real-time distributed processing of data. And so I wrote a whole system around it and had a very simple API. It made it very easy to deploy applications. It was just very easy to use. Um and it was very very scalable. The startup I was working at, BackType, we got acquired by Twitter.

[00:00:53]And as part of the condition of the acquisition, I negotiated that they would have to let me open source Storm from Twitter, which was gave great social proof to the project and just a great platform from which to release the project. I open sourced it at StrangeLoop in September of 2011. And it just caught fire immediately. I think I had over a thousand stars on GitHub on the first day. We had our first production user outside of uh us. It was a startup in England just 3 weeks later.

[00:01:19]And then within a year we already had like a ton of huge companies using it very heavily like Yahoo and Alibaba. So it got huge adoption, became a very big project. I could have pursued a company around Storm. I decided not to because I thought what I ended up working on was much more interesting and would be much more impactful. And so I ended up joining donating Storm to the Apache Foundation and then became an Apache project from there.

[00:01:44]What I've been working on for the last 10 years is something called Rama. And at the heart of Rama is a new general purpose language that implements a new programming paradigm that's never existed before. And at the core of this paradigm, it generalizes the concept of a function that's able to just do more things, but I'm still able to do it within Clojure. I'm not restricted by the abstractions that Clojure provides because you can just do so much with macros. These are the kinds of things that every Clojure programmer will just nod their head and be like, "Oh yeah, that makes sense." And every non-Clojure programmer is going to be baffled cuz they can't even conceive of how how such a thing could be possible.