Programming Models for Distributed Computation | Hacker News Reader

Programming Models for Distributed Computation

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174 pointssimonpure26 comments

The menu of papers for the associated class, https://heather.miller.am/teaching/cs7680/, looks really rich. The class is from 2016. Looks like the book dates from 2016-2017. My first impression was that this was work in progress ...

I'd be curious to see what from this set Adrian Colyer https://blog.acolyer.org/ has already digested.

A perhaps interesting follow on would be to see which of these programming models are manifest today across the big cloud services .. or how they have advanced from this legacy work.

Linear Logic / Session Types seem interesting. I've poked around some of the papers, but I'm not sure how to approach the subject yet.

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/linear-logic.ht...

Session Types, AFAIU are a specific implementation of a linear logic in some type system and I am not all too familiar with them in practice. However, I would like to think I am well versed in Linear Logic and Substructural Type Theory. I think the works by Wadler are a good place to start, in particular is a sort of review paper, based in intuitionistic logic (which he also covers in said paper), on linear logic. It’s called ‘A Taste of Linear Logic’ (I actually have the paper open in Safari on my iPhone as I type this) and it is written as a sort of primer on the area. Wadler’s bibliographies on the works contained in the pages you linked are a good source as well. If you are at all coming from a place of familiarity with Haskell, a decent overview of the current discussions on Linear Types in functional languages is at [2]. And lastly, if you like videos, Simon Peyton Jones has a great talk on YouTube [3] where he discusses practical linear types for Haskell, but the theory is not Haskell specific.

I will warn you that the latter two references make several arguments and then discuss uniqueness typing (which is related but very different) and that is a whole other rabbit hole of sources, but generally a good topic to dig into as well.

[1] https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/lineartaste/lin...

[2] http://edsko.net/2017/01/08/linearity-in-haskell/

[3] https://youtu.be/t0mhvd3-60Y

For those who didn't figure it out - instead of raw markdown you can read the book already in html format that browsers can render: http://dist-prog-book.com/chapter/

I haven’t checked these links for a couple of years, but here’s a collection of distributed systems reading lists I compiled.

https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368

lol hn never fails in it's shallow dismissal of an enormous amount of work: as of right now there's a comment on how this textbook is too shallow (I guess if it were a content marketing medium post it would be much better) and how it can't possibly be substantive because it's written in markdown.

man what a bastion of intelligent discussion this place is.

It is fair to point out this is a product of a highly regarded computer science school.

So the honest question is: should we subject industry e.g. blogs to the same standard as the academy. I would think we should hold academic products to a much higher standard. I do agree criticism should be constructive. (One of PRs for example noted lack of mention of CSP.)

>I would think we should hold academic products to a much higher standard

who is we? are you a tt prof at literally the number 1 cs school in the US? are you a reviewer for any distributed journals? the author of this book is a wildly successful researcher. why should i trust literally almost anyone's here opinion over their opinion?

Maybe when you're assessing the relative quality we should consider this context with more weight, but should that excuse industry for presenting expertise via a light-weight puff piece PR posting?

Hum... It does really depend.

Honestly, for me right now, coming from HN into random places, no I don't have different standards. But in a course having a textbook recommendation, yes, the standards are very different.

Anyway, you are out on a tangent. The work should be judged based on its quality, and for all the dimensions quality has, the presentation format is not one that matters.

Please don't make this place even worse by adding a supercilious dismissal to a shallow one.

If you think it's possible for a large, public internet forum not to get a lot of ignorant or shitty comments, that's extremely mistaken. What's necessary is for people who know more to post better ones. Since you seem to know more, you should be helping with that, not adding to the bottom of the barrel by dumping on it.

There are excellent comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22710928 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22709644. I'm sure you could write something better if you tried. Indeed, you occasionally have done so.

>If you think it's possible for a large, public internet forum not to get a lot of ignorant or shitty comments

why is it that the tech subs at reddit don't have the same kind of policing you practice here and are just as productive? i wonder if it's because community policing is more effective than whatever brand of dictatorial policing you practice here hmmmmmm. the only difference between the moderation here and at reddit that i see is your self-importance and the effect it has on anyone who feels they're part of the same self-important rarefied club.

Which subreddits are you referring to?

r/programming, r/math, r/physics, r/compsci. All of them don't have nearly the strict moderation you practice here and all of them are great places to have substantive discussion.

I'm gonna repeat what I've said many times: by enforcing a strict decorum what you actually accomplish, and I mean exactly you dang, is give the air/pretense of intellectualism without any of the substance. Hence the constant barrage of hypercritical (but superficial) disparaging comments. It's like any other system that privileges one type of language - those that can deploy it effectivity feel empowered and emboldened because they feel they are the defacto ethical/just/concordant.

If you wanted proscribe things for the betterment of the community you should proscribe content (e.g. hate speech) rather than language.

edit:

this comment is the exemplar par excellence of what your rules produce:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17034295

for many hours it was the highest ranking comment on that post. it is pure invective cloaked in "constructive criticism". it took me pointing outing how absolutely rude it was for it to start bubbling down. i'm not a hero. i'm simply pointing out that it is absolutely necessary to point out when someone is being rude.

The content seems shallow, the topic is extremely broad. Overall I do not feel this topic can be described really well.

I think "shallow" is being a bit uncharitable. The book here doesn't dive into ditributed systems theory very deeply but it gives a very rich overview of real industry tools used over the past few decades with plenty of context around why technologies are being used or discarded. They go into code examples of things like CRDTs so its not like its just prose.

One thing that feels off to me as a backend engineer that deals with distributed systems in practice is no treatment (AFAICT) of containers/virtual machines and how tools like kubernetes are providing the primitives that the distributed languages of the past provided. In general I think chapter 4 doesn't have a cohesive narrative on its treatment of languages for distributed computation. I know this is messy topic but I think more could be done to tie things to current art.

If I were to make a prediction, there's general trend towards protocols (mostly network level above layer 4) being the actual thing of interest for distributed computation, not single language runtimes. Wire-compatible DBs like AWS aurora and MySQL are an example, but also I think things like container orchestator's liveness and readiness checks over HTTP. As more primitives rally around the same core concepts, I think the general trend will be to go from conceptual similarity, to client library compatability (e.g. identical interfaces a la OpenTracing <> Lightstep, Jaeger) and eventually wire/protocol compatibility. Language runtimes are too much of a moving target as there are other pressures at play (community, tooling, typing, yes even syntax) that go into language choices over a decade.

Yes, i was also a bit disappointed reading e.g. the reference e.g. about CSPs, it should at least link some other textbooks here. However, I admire the work being put into this. It would be great if all university teachers would make the effort to publish open access. A dream would be collaboratively maintained textbooks with strong single editors for readability and consistent style. Also there should be foundations like apache, etc that market such material and put up quality control, pay lectors where the publishers are largely failing atm.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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