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by jeffreygoesto 2773 days ago
ROTFLBTC! Seriously, I always tell people that there is no global/common "now()" in a (our sigh) distributed system. Leslie Lamport explained it back in 1978 already [1]. Any design assuming that is doomed to fail.

[1] i.e. discussion at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/time-cl...

1 comments

Not only this. In the domain of lazy functional languages they have arrived to a similar conclusion - the only way to establish an order of evaluation in a lazy language is via nesting of function calls, which is an implementation of causality principle, if you think of it for a while. No wonder monads and other things desugars into nested function calls.

"Time" is an abstract concept superimposed on reality, a product of the mind conditioned via sequential sense organs. It is of the same nature as the concepts of "god" and "divinity". Smart people are trying to rule it out from their computations.