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> I haven’t seen option 2 things referred to as serverless. People use "blockchain" to describe it to other non-technical people, but they do need a way to des

> I haven’t seen option 2 things referred to as serverless. People use "blockchain" to describe it to other non-technical people, but they do need a way to describe their architecture. Among blockchain/crypto developers the word "blockchain" has become washed down too much that it really doesn't mean anything. So when they need to explain their architecture they do need a way to describe how their app doesn't have a server. What I've seen is people say "my app is 'TRULY' serverless", or "My app does not require a centralized server". This was actually my point, because it looks like people who are actually building truly "serverless" apps find themselves in a situation where the word has been hijacked by server vendors, so they have to use qualifiers like "truly", or explain it out in more detail to actually express that they indeed don't have a server. Not saying all the FaaS guys don't have a point, just saying it's kind of a funny situation not so different from when "hoverboard" was viral a few years ago. Everyone knew it didn't "hover" but it was too late because the brand was already taken. > But it really does mean swrverless in that (a) there isn’t one server Normally when you say "X-less", it means "there is NO X", not "there are more than one X".

IgorPartola 9y ago
Would you say that if you use Zipcar and don’t own your own vehicle, you live a carless lifestyle? And are you saying that people in the crypto world have blockchain as such an implicit given that they don’t need to describe it, but a distributed nature of its operation is something that explicitly needs to be stated every time? That seems really silly. “As a public ledger” is better than serverless in that case. Or “smart contracts”. But serverless really is a misnomer buzzword in that case.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  > Would you say that if you use Zipcar and don’t own your own vehicle, you live a carless lifestyle? This is all wordplay and we can go on forever like this. Using your measure, we can also say any SaaS is "serverless"--heroku is serverless, aws is serverless, digitalocean is serverless--because nobody owns a physical server anymore. > And are you saying that people in the crypto world have blockchain as such an implicit given that they don’t need to describe it, but a distributed nature of its operation is something that explicitly needs to be stated every time? That seems really silly. “As a public ledger” is better than serverless in that case. Or “smart contracts”. But serverless really is a misnomer buzzword in that case. Again, this is really difference in interpretation of expressions. When you use Ethereum to write a smart contract, you basically store your application state on Ethereum. Compared to ordinary apps where you host your app on a server you own, this sound pretty much "serverless". If you have an AWS instance you have to pay monthly fee. If you deploy a contract to Ethereum, you just pay once when you deploy, but once deployed you don't pay for hosting. "Public Ledger" is an ambiguous terminology which doesn't fully describe what blockchains do either. You could have a public ledger without it being decentralized nor transparent. A central authority could just make their own database public, but they could always manipulate the data if they own the database. The whole point of blockchain is that no one party should be able to control the truth. "smart contract" is also generally considered a ridiculous terminology by those who actually do work on building "smart contracts". They are mostly "dumb" contracts. In fact, when you write these contracts, the dumber the contract is the better it is. If you try to be too clever, you end up with stupid mistakes like the parity hack. Therefore most "smart contracts" are ideally nothing more than transparent auto-updating distributed databases which can send messages to one another. I'm not saying you're wrong and I'm right. I'm not even saying blockchains should be called "serverless" instead of FaaS owning the brand. I'm just stating what I've observed: Most FaaS services are hosted on a server that the owner needs to pay for every month. Blockchains don't have an owner and there is no "server". I think blockchains are closer to "serverless" than FaaS because of this, but by no means I consider this a perfect description of the technology.
somberi 9y ago
Language construct trip - Less Sugar vs Sugarless. On a separate track - Is it the sign of my age, that I am either concerned about developers not knowing the impact of their code on the hardware, or just whimsical and miss the days when one opened strace or kdb to see how efficiently the code executes? Does someone else feel this way? One of the less desirable side effects of hardware becoming cheaper is that there are many places for a lousy programmer to hide.

IgorPartola 9y ago

Would you say that if you use Zipcar and don’t own your own vehicle, you live a carless lifestyle? And are you saying that people in the crypto world have blockchain as such an implicit given that they don’t need to describe it, but a distributed nature of its operation is something that explicitly needs to be stated every time? That seems really silly. “As a public ledger” is better than serverless in that case. Or “smart contracts”. But serverless really is a misnomer buzzword in that case.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
> Would you say that if you use Zipcar and don’t own your own vehicle, you live a carless lifestyle? This is all wordplay and we can go on forever like this. Using your measure, we can also say any SaaS is "serverless"--heroku is serverless, aws is serverless, digitalocean is serverless--because nobody owns a physical server anymore. > And are you saying that people in the crypto world have blockchain as such an implicit given that they don’t need to describe it, but a distributed nature of its operation is something that explicitly needs to be stated every time? That seems really silly. “As a public ledger” is better than serverless in that case. Or “smart contracts”. But serverless really is a misnomer buzzword in that case. Again, this is really difference in interpretation of expressions. When you use Ethereum to write a smart contract, you basically store your application state on Ethereum. Compared to ordinary apps where you host your app on a server you own, this sound pretty much "serverless". If you have an AWS instance you have to pay monthly fee. If you deploy a contract to Ethereum, you just pay once when you deploy, but once deployed you don't pay for hosting. "Public Ledger" is an ambiguous terminology which doesn't fully describe what blockchains do either. You could have a public ledger without it being decentralized nor transparent. A central authority could just make their own database public, but they could always manipulate the data if they own the database. The whole point of blockchain is that no one party should be able to control the truth. "smart contract" is also generally considered a ridiculous terminology by those who actually do work on building "smart contracts". They are mostly "dumb" contracts. In fact, when you write these contracts, the dumber the contract is the better it is. If you try to be too clever, you end up with stupid mistakes like the parity hack. Therefore most "smart contracts" are ideally nothing more than transparent auto-updating distributed databases which can send messages to one another. I'm not saying you're wrong and I'm right. I'm not even saying blockchains should be called "serverless" instead of FaaS owning the brand. I'm just stating what I've observed: Most FaaS services are hosted on a server that the owner needs to pay for every month. Blockchains don't have an owner and there is no "server". I think blockchains are closer to "serverless" than FaaS because of this, but by no means I consider this a perfect description of the technology.

somberi 9y ago

Language construct trip - Less Sugar vs Sugarless. On a separate track - Is it the sign of my age, that I am either concerned about developers not knowing the impact of their code on the hardware, or just whimsical and miss the days when one opened strace or kdb to see how efficiently the code executes? Does someone else feel this way? One of the less desirable side effects of hardware becoming cheaper is that there are many places for a lousy programmer to hide.