
The Writings of Leslie Lamport - Anon84
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html
======
jdf
Lamport's description of his failures in introducing the Paxos algorithm is a
highly amusing story:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#lamport-paxos)

For those that don't know, Paxos is one of the most important algorithms in
distributed systems, so it's amazing to see that it wasn't even published for
8 years due to the author's ... odd structuring of the problem.

~~~
chubot
Whenever you have a good idea, you have to bash people over the head with it.
I guess he tried that with the Indiana Jones thing and it failed. He says
Butler Lampson was one of the few people who noticed its significance.

But the problem is that when you have a BAD idea you also may find yourself
bashing people over the head with it :)

I wonder if he will win the Turing Award for Paxos. Awhile ago I thought it
would be deserved, but I also feel like the full state machine is a bit
awkward and heavy-handed for a lot of distributed systems problems (especially
distributed systems over WAN, which I think is more interesting these days). I
like the Bloom/CRDT work. And Raft is a simpler algorithm when you need strong
consensus.

~~~
mjb
The core of Raft appears isomorphic to Paxos, with the addition of clearly
explained and well-specified details for extending it into a working consensus
system. It's cool and useful work, and is likely to be influential in the long
run, but doesn't reduce the significance of Paxos at all. Similarly, CRDTs are
a useful and interesting area of research, very applicable to many real-world
problems, but they aren't the same problems Paxos solves.

You also can't ignore his other work in logical clocks, the bakery algorithm,
the Chandy-Lamport algorithm, and TLA+.

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cia_plant
"Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" is among
the best papers I've ever read, many other great pieces here as well.

~~~
zzzcpan
Yeah, it's kind of one of the first things to read on distributed systems too.

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keithpeter
_" I was a TeX user, so I would need a set of macros. I thought that, with a
little extra effort, I could make my macros usable by others.[..]"_

Read the summary for paper number 69. Many here may recognise the syndrome,
the punchline being the last sentence. As I use LaTeX a little, I'm grateful.

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nullc
All of my best ideas, Lamport invented them first.

Lots of great and important ideas and the lucid writing required to convey
them to others.

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discreteevent
"Computer scientists collectively suffer from what I call the Whorfian
syndrome the confusion of language with reality. Since these devices are
described in different languages, they must all be different. In fact, they
(..all computation basically..)are all naturally described as state machines."

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t1m
I think it's a crime the editors failed to recognize the fundamental
importance of Lamort's ground breaking paper "On Hair Color in France".

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/lamport/pubs/h...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/lamport/pubs/hair.pdf)

~~~
f137
A seminal study. It's a pity they did not publish a follow-up on the selection
criteria (or did they?)

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ecesena
This should be made as a service

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luckydude
I'm surprised at how little traction this gotten here.

You all like to think that you have it covered. This guy did a lot of the work
that is the basis for what you do.

Go read it. If you don't understand how to do time in a distributed system you
suck. He figured it out before you were born.

Edit: sorry, should have read the comments first.

