[andrewla]

Thanks so much for the reply! This clears a lot up, and I'm happy to see that my basic understand was not too far off.

I don't completely buy into the notion that this needs to be soup-to-nuts; that the T2 / MFM / Ulam stack is a necessarily the right way forward.

But I think that what I see as the core insight -- that determinism and synchronicity is the deep rot at the core of our understanding of how to build distributed systems -- is true beyond all reasonable doubt. The idea of evolving (literally or figuratively) self-healing systems and components is I think at the core of the future of computer science.

And the dirty secret of all distributed systems of significant scale is that they have already escaped the attempt to confine them -- operational complexity has become a matter of botany, but without any insights or tools to help us deal with the actual complexity, but instead applying layers of attempts to reduce complexity that usually just end up reducing the legibility of the system.