it, uh, does not look like a CS paper. for instance, the abstract:
"Recent archaeological discoveries on the island of Paxos reveal that the parliament functioned despite the peripatetic propensity of its part-time legislators. The legislators maintained consistent copies of the parliamentary record, despite their frequent forays from the chamber and the forgetfulness of their messengers. The Paxon parliament’s protocol provides a new way of implementing the state-machine approach to the design of distributed systems."
the whole thing is written in a rambling style; it goes into great detail about this Greek isle of Paxos and what the people wore and what they were like; but actually the paper is about "how to maintain consistent logs between a bunch of computers."
it is... very charming, and I did have a blast reading it, even if i sent a furious message to a friend while reading: "when you said 'it's Greek to me' i thought you meant like the expression not there are literal Greek words thrown in here without context what the hell"
...however, it turns out this algorithm is very complicated and subtle, and thus the (admittedly charming!) Greek isle allegory only served to obfuscate understanding of a pretty complicated algorithm. the author, Mr. Lamport, was a noted jackass, and got pissed whenever people complained about this.
eventually, however, a colleague he actually respected (presumably only one of two on the entire planet) said "yo i still don't understand Paxos"
so Lamport responded by published the most stunningly passive-aggressive follow-up paper ever, "Paxos Made Simple", in which he insults the reader's intelligence multiple times by insisting THIS IS SO SIMPLE WHY DON'T YOU DUMB BITCHES GET IT.
the follow-up paper is less charmingly fantasy-novel-esque than the o.g. paper, but it's also the one i wish i'd been assigned to read first, haha :P
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Date: 2020-06-22 08:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-22 06:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-22 09:10 am (UTC)so there's this famous paper in distributed systems titled "The Part-Time Parliament."
it, uh, does not look like a CS paper. for instance, the abstract:
"Recent archaeological discoveries on the island of Paxos reveal that the parliament functioned despite the peripatetic propensity of its part-time legislators. The legislators maintained consistent copies of the parliamentary record, despite their frequent forays from the chamber and the forgetfulness of their messengers. The Paxon parliament’s protocol provides a new way of implementing the state-machine approach to the design of distributed systems."
the whole thing is written in a rambling style; it goes into great detail about this Greek isle of Paxos and what the people wore and what they were like; but actually the paper is about "how to maintain consistent logs between a bunch of computers."
it is... very charming, and I did have a blast reading it, even if i sent a furious message to a friend while reading: "when you said 'it's Greek to me' i thought you meant like the expression not there are literal Greek words thrown in here without context what the hell"
...however, it turns out this algorithm is very complicated and subtle, and thus the (admittedly charming!) Greek isle allegory only served to obfuscate understanding of a pretty complicated algorithm. the author, Mr. Lamport, was a noted jackass, and got pissed whenever people complained about this.
eventually, however, a colleague he actually respected (presumably only one of two on the entire planet) said "yo i still don't understand Paxos"
so Lamport responded by published the most stunningly passive-aggressive follow-up paper ever, "Paxos Made Simple", in which he insults the reader's intelligence multiple times by insisting THIS IS SO SIMPLE WHY DON'T YOU DUMB BITCHES GET IT.
the follow-up paper is less charmingly fantasy-novel-esque than the o.g. paper, but it's also the one i wish i'd been assigned to read first, haha :P