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I actually sort of agree with his idea that our portable devices should be stateless, but the way he puts it comes off way too much like "storage is magic that

I actually sort of agree with his idea that our portable devices should be stateless, but the way he puts it comes off way too much like "storage is magic that someone else should deal with" for me. Scalable storage with a usable interface (i.e. not an HTTP-based eventually-consistent object store) is hard enough even in a LAN environment. Making it happen in a WAN environment, which is what he's asking for, involves some very hard tradeoffs and engineering problems equivalent to anything you might do with the data once you get it. It's very disappointing to see what amounts to "other people's problem" from someone of his stature.

apathy 10y ago
That's a bit silly. His perspective is that of someone who watched tractable solutions to the cached-state and resync/reconciliation problems be implemented and then marginalized, since no one at the time saw the point. Now, 20-30 years later, it's starting to dawn on people, and the response is essentially a kludge. I'm disappointed, and I was never at Bell Labs. I imagine Pike is being diplomatic, to be honest. Research is incredibly frustrating when it depends so much on fashion.
hollerith 10y ago
Pike has at least 15 years of experience using stateless client devices on a large LAN (at Bell Labs) and being one of the leaders of a team providing the infrastructure (Plan 9) to make those devices usable.