[aboodman]

FWIW, I disagree that it is necessary (or even desirable) to understand the academic basis first.

The core idea of CRDTs are intuitive and easy to understand from an engineering perspective. For me, the academic literature unnecessarily complicates and obscures what's going on, and I would also point newcomers to something like http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/.

It probably has to do with where you are coming from. If you're not a mathematician or theoretical computer scientist, I don't think that reading these documents is going to be a very helpful start.

[dboreham]

I hear you because I thought the same way until recently. I have worked with eventually consistent replication since long before the CRDT papers and thought initially it was just some academic mumbo jumbo layered over intuition. However, based on my journey through the field I'd encourage you to try again to grokk the academic side of the work because it's really the key insight and (for me) it's very much not intuitive. In fact that's the tripping hazard in all this: the simple examples are intuitive which leads to a sense that everything is similarly intuitive. Not so, for me at least.

I'm neither Mathematician nor Computer Scientist (I'm an Electrical Engineer), but I have learned not to fear formal notation and advanced abstract concepts. They're really not that hard to understand once the terminology is decoded.

[sophacles]

At one point I was strugging with the basics of CRDTs. Someone linked me to this gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMMDVphop40

It made a lot of stuff click for me. HTH someone!