[l33t7332273]

Can you elaborate on idempotency in the context os CS papers?

I’m familiar with the concept wrt mathematics(in particular in the context of ulter-a-filters as my favorite professor would say it), but I don’t see the necessity in most CS research.

[LAC-Tech]

Idempotency (as I understand it, what maths people might call an 'idempotent function') is a very core idea in distributed systems - networks are unreliable, stuff may get lost, or you might not get an acknowledgment back, so the ability to send the same thing 1 0r a million times and end up with the same state is useful.

Or have I completely missed the point of your question..?

[NortySpock]

It is also super useful in ye olde batch process / etl process. Designing an ingest-analyze-report process to checkpoint its work and recover gracefully even when started at an unexpected time or place means you can retry safely rather than have to manually clear out the detritus of a partial job run.

[kbutler]

I think autotune was saying that software often does shortcut hacks violating some of those principles as an optimization. This can be a topic for research into the tradeoffs (e.g., CAP theorem), but may be more common in non-research-based implementations (e.g., NoSQL databases because ACID is slow/constraining/etc.)