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This quote is fine to use for fun/irony, but should absolutely not be taken seriously. Some seriously hard problems in computer science: distributed programmin
by haberman 15y ago
This quote is fine to use for fun/irony, but should absolutely not be taken seriously.
Some seriously hard problems in computer science: distributed programming (consensus, consistency, handling machine failure), parallel programming models, proving correctness of nontrivial programs, P?=NP.
- gaius 15y agoThose are all special cases of the cache invalidation problem.
- haberman 15y agoI knew someone would try to say that. If you take that line, then everything is cache invalidation. It's amazing the lengths people will go to to justify wise-sounding-but-wrong sayings like the above. Cmon, P?=NP is cache invalidation? Be serious.
- gaius 15y agoAll the distributed/parallel stuff is, yes. It's not meant to be a literal, pedantically correct statement, it's meant to be an insight, and enough people think that it is that this quote gets repeated. By all means print out your own page in 4-point text of what is and is not a hard problem and stick it on your own wall.
- haberman 15y agoConsensus is most categorically not cache invalidation. Consensus is about creating new information, namely a decision about which a group of machines/processes agree. It's not insightful if it leads people to the wrong conclusions. It would be more insightful to impress on people that CS is a large and diverse field with more hard problems than can be reduced to a single pithy saying.