Time is Partial: distributed consistency models and weak memory models

composition.al

59 pointsmatt_d3 comments

> Time is Partial

This is definitely a new development in philosophy and even in physics. Joe Armstrong would really appreciate this.

I almost could see it vividly - the beard, 0-rh designer glasses, macbook pro with many stickers and a vegan smoothie. Time is partial, dude, you know.

ROTFLBTC! Seriously, I always tell people that there is no global/common "now()" in a (our sigh) distributed system. Leslie Lamport explained it back in 1978 already [1]. Any design assuming that is doomed to fail.

[1] i.e. discussion at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/time-cl...

Not only this. In the domain of lazy functional languages they have arrived to a similar conclusion - the only way to establish an order of evaluation in a lazy language is via nesting of function calls, which is an implementation of causality principle, if you think of it for a while. No wonder monads and other things desugars into nested function calls.

"Time" is an abstract concept superimposed on reality, a product of the mind conditioned via sequential sense organs. It is of the same nature as the concepts of "god" and "divinity". Smart people are trying to rule it out from their computations.

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