alt Hacker NewsI thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages
It was originablly conceived as a simulation of a distributed system.
Distributed systems can be useful but does anyone really believe that they are simpler or easier to develop and maintain?
The amazing part to me is that so many were trained and convinced to accept that adopting this simulation could make all programming easier or somehow "better". As if adding complexity would magically lead to simplification.
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Generally speaking, toy examples can always be made to look simple. In reality it often means the “hard part” was moved into the shadows, not actually solved.
Graphical programming like LabVIEW looks very appealing. The product demo practically sells itself. Sure, it fits well for a very narrow class of use cases. But even fairly simple things in a textual language quickly become an unwieldy mess. (Try factoring an integer in it…)
There are formal models for distributed systems often solve the “easy” problems that didn’t need solving while making various practical concerns harder/impossible such as timeouts or node failure.
Just a guess, it may be that he understood distribution more as the static distribution of meaning in fine grain entities (objects) to allow a wide range of context, flexibility. Not necessarily the time aspect of distribution.
> Distributed systems can be useful but does anyone really believe that they are simpler or easier to develop and maintain?
Dinosaur. Whale.
I think these were success stories for a long time. So, it is possible to develop and maintain complex systems.
>Distributed systems can be useful but does anyone really believe that they are simpler or easier to develop and maintain?
If you try to maintain a decentralized system, it will be hard yes.
However if you see the nirvana and try to maintain the parts of the system, it will be easier.
> Distributed systems can be useful but does anyone really believe that they are simpler or easier to develop and maintain?
I believe that programs written in languages made for distributed systems are simpler and easier to maintain.
Also I believe that one of the major problems in modern computing is that most languages we use do not understand that even trivial programs require ‘communication’ and OS/hardware facilities that have behaviours of distributed systems such as latency, transient faults, etc.