[chubot]

Whenever you have a good idea, you have to bash people over the head with it. I guess he tried that with the Indiana Jones thing and it failed. He says Butler Lampson was one of the few people who noticed its significance.

But the problem is that when you have a BAD idea you also may find yourself bashing people over the head with it :)

I wonder if he will win the Turing Award for Paxos. Awhile ago I thought it would be deserved, but I also feel like the full state machine is a bit awkward and heavy-handed for a lot of distributed systems problems (especially distributed systems over WAN, which I think is more interesting these days). I like the Bloom/CRDT work. And Raft is a simpler algorithm when you need strong consensus.

[mjb]

The core of Raft appears isomorphic to Paxos, with the addition of clearly explained and well-specified details for extending it into a working consensus system. It's cool and useful work, and is likely to be influential in the long run, but doesn't reduce the significance of Paxos at all. Similarly, CRDTs are a useful and interesting area of research, very applicable to many real-world problems, but they aren't the same problems Paxos solves.

You also can't ignore his other work in logical clocks, the bakery algorithm, the Chandy-Lamport algorithm, and TLA+.

[pkj]

A really good intro to Raft --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbZ3zDzDnrw

Very useful if you are into distributed systems and would like to see a practical implementation with clear examples.