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Raft itself is very nice, and the paper https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/11370504/raft.pdf https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/at
by toolslive 12y ago
Raft itself is very nice, and the paper
https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/11370504/raft.pdf https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/1137...
Does an excellent job in explaining it, but
I have some problems with this claim:
"A user study with 43 students
at two universities shows that Raft is significantly easier
to understand than Paxos: after learning both algorithms,
33 of these students were able to answer questions about
Raft better than questions about Paxos".
Honestly, what I think happened is this: They first explained paxos to the poor students, then asked questions.
In a later session explained Raft and asked questions.
Can't it be the students started processing the problem of distributed consensus between the sessions so they got a better grasp of the topic? This would mean paxos helped them understand raft better.
Anyway I'm nitpicking etc etc.
- sbhat7 12y agoFrom 9.1 section in the paper, > Each student watched one video, took the corresponding quiz, watched the second video, and took the second quiz. About half of the participants did the Paxos portion first and the other half did the Raft portion first in order to account for both individual differences in performance and experience gained from the first portion of the study. We compared participants’ scores on each quiz to deter- mine whether participants showed a better understanding of Raft.
- toolslive 12y agoThis seems to be a good strategy but it is difficult to factor out the quality of the explanations. The reason I'm so picky about this claim is that before you know it, you have mythical pseudo-statistical claims like "some programmers are more than 10 times as good as others" that will live a life of their own. CS has way too many of those.