[jclem]

An LWW register is most certainly a CRDT, it just has limited use. I think you’re making a good point about how one must be careful applying CRDTs, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that a suboptimal merge strategy in terms of user experience means that something does not meet the definition of a CRDT.

In other words, the “conflict-free” part of the term refers to the fact that all replicas converge on the same value when all updates have been exchanged. What you’re discussing seems to have more to do with concerns around intention preservation when using CRDTs. In other words, an LWW register on a text field is still a CRDT, but in many applications it is potentially a poor choice in terms of preserving the intent of user-generated operations, but determining this is something done in a case-by-case basis.

If the content is a long document which users collaborate on over time, then a register is most certainly a poor choice. If it is a short text field akin to a label, an LWW register isn’t necessarily bad, because user intent is likely to replace the entire value, rather than to perform minute edits on the value.

[danbruc]

I just reread the Wikipedia article on CRDTs and was actually wrong. I only had a subset of CRDTs in mind but they actually encompass a much wider class than I thought. In some way I now understand the fuzz about them even less, they now look almost trivial, but maybe I am still not understanding some important aspect properly. Should maybe read the paper introducing them. But at the very least I should not complain about people calling things CRDTs that actually fall under the actual definition.

[kiwicopple]

> But at the very least I should not complain about people calling things CRDTs that actually fall under the actual definition

that's... a very reasonable response. Nice one.

I think the fuzz comes from the more esoteric CRDTs, which solve actually hard problems (traditionally solved by Operational Transforms). But I don't think I could have created a simple example in the blog post for one of these.