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Idempotency, testing, readability, and longevity are all too often ignored in CS and tech in the name of speed and simplicity.
by autotune 3y ago
Idempotency, testing, readability, and longevity are all too often ignored in CS and tech in the name of speed and simplicity.
- l33t7332273 3y agoCan you elaborate on idempotency in the context os CS papers? I’m familiar with the concept wrt mathematics(in particular in the context of ulter-a-filters as my favorite professor would say it), but I don’t see the necessity in most CS research.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoIdempotency (as I understand it, what maths people might call an 'idempotent function') is a very core idea in distributed systems - networks are unreliable, stuff may get lost, or you might not get an acknowledgment back, so the ability to send the same thing 1 0r a million times and end up with the same state is useful. Or have I completely missed the point of your question..?
- NortySpock 3y agoIt is also super useful in ye olde batch process / etl process. Designing an ingest-analyze-report process to checkpoint its work and recover gracefully even when started at an unexpected time or place means you can retry safely rather than have to manually clear out the detritus of a partial job run.
- kbutler 3y agoI think autotune was saying that software often does shortcut hacks violating some of those principles as an optimization. This can be a topic for research into the tradeoffs (e.g., CAP theorem), but may be more common in non-research-based implementations (e.g., NoSQL databases because ACID is slow/constraining/etc.)