> Imagine what you could do if you didn't even assume a process model? We have that world, it's called single-process apps. And it's awful from the point of vi

> Imagine what you could do if you didn't even assume a process model? We have that world, it's called single-process apps. And it's awful from the point of view of security, scalability and disaster recovery. > All app state just resident in memory, but magically persisted? You need transactions or this ends unhappily. Some languages truly grok transactional updates to state. Most do not. In the meantime, you've rate limited the entire system to the slowest component. > We could have lived in the future, now it seems we're permanently wed to the past. Your friend overlooks that extremely intelligent people have looked into these things. They usually had extremely important disadvantages, which sufficiently offset the advantages that mere momentum kept the majority approaches as the majority approaches. Your friend also seems to have left it as an exercise for the reader on how one is meant to deal with distributed systems. The short answer is: it is hard, and trying to create the seamless illusion that the network doesn't exist hasn't really panned out. The speed of light is a cruel limit.