4 ms·
This has nothing to do with the software itself, but it bothers me: Why do you call a "high-throughput distributed messaging system" Kafka? Kafka's stories esse
by rmk2 13y ago
This has nothing to do with the software itself, but it bothers me: Why do you call a "high-throughput distributed messaging system" Kafka? Kafka's stories essentially describe the polar-opposite: crippled, ineffective, labyrinthine message systems that are exceedingly hierarchical in nature. They are also rather user-unfriendly, i.e. their users usually die horrible, lonely deaths. Am I just missing the in-joke here, and it's called Kafka because it is exactly the opposite of this, or did somebody overdo the hipster naming scheme?
- mst 13y agoIt's written in Scala, so perhaps the reference is to the source code rather than the client interface ... ... or maybe you're just overthinking it.
- cleaver 13y agoThat was my first thought. Based on the novels I've read, I would interpret it in a couple of possible ways: - You receive a message, but the system can't tell you why your received it nor what you should do. (The Trial) - It's not a distributed messaging system with bugs. Actually, you are the bug. (Metamorphosis) As an aside, I went to a tech conference in Prague two months ago and visited Café Slavia, a hangout not just of Kafka, but also author Milan Kundera and president/poet Václav Havel. I had a glass of absinthe in their honour.
- boredandroid 13y agoThe rationale was that it should be a writer because we were building a distributed log or journal (a service dedicated to writing). The writer needed to be someone that (1) I liked, (2) sounded cool as a name, (3) was dead (because it would be creepy to use the name of someone who was alive).
- mumrah 13y agoAt LinkedIn, they started code naming projects after authors and literary works. E.g., Kafka, Camus, and a bunch of Harry Potter references. Kafka was donated to Apache by LinkedIn and the name stuck.