3 ms·
I recall paper trail had some errors in their post on paxos (iirc), which made me more skeptical of the publication in general. But these are good links!!
by Vervious 6y ago
I recall paper trail had some errors in their post on paxos (iirc), which made me more skeptical of the publication in general. But these are good links!!
- mjb 6y agoWell, "Paxos Made Simple" has some errors, so if you're skeptical about stuff with errors your options are rather limited. See https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#paxos-simple https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#paxos-simpl... Ok, might not be fair to call it an error, but it is super confusing, and a great example of Lamport's larger point that writing prose about these things is really hard, and we need better tools (like TLA+).
- thamer 6y agoInteresting note: "one sentence in this paper is ambiguous [...] I am not going to remove this ambiguity or reveal where it is." I find it surprising that he didn't actually attempt to change this problematic sentence if it was clearly shown that it leads to incorrect implementations. I get his point about prose, but a tiny footnote on a webpage doesn't feel like the best way to highlight what seems to be a common misunderstanding. Any idea what this ambiguous sentence might be, and what is this mistake that implementers tend to make?