[mjb]

Well, "Paxos Made Simple" has some errors, so if you're skeptical about stuff with errors your options are rather limited.

See https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#paxos-simpl... Ok, might not be fair to call it an error, but it is super confusing, and a great example of Lamport's larger point that writing prose about these things is really hard, and we need better tools (like TLA+).

[thamer]

Interesting note: "one sentence in this paper is ambiguous [...] I am not going to remove this ambiguity or reveal where it is."

I find it surprising that he didn't actually attempt to change this problematic sentence if it was clearly shown that it leads to incorrect implementations. I get his point about prose, but a tiny footnote on a webpage doesn't feel like the best way to highlight what seems to be a common misunderstanding.

Any idea what this ambiguous sentence might be, and what is this mistake that implementers tend to make?