21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)(blog.apnic.net)

64 pointsby teleforce7 hours ago6 comments

jffhnan hour ago
Also, the four fallacies of local computing:
- The CPU is infinitely fast.
- RAM is infinite.
- CPU caches don't exist.
- Cache lines don't exist.
- mojuba8 minutes ago
  - The computer is plugged to an infinite source of unlimited power
  This was big before the mobile era and is true to this day to an extent. Many mainstream languages created in the 1990s (I call them "the children of the 1990s") were designed with this fallacy plus the ones you listed as a basis: JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Java, etc.
- necovek31 minutes ago
  Disk never gets filled up.
jrpelkonen5 hours ago
In this instance latency must’ve been 10 years, per my memory this paper came out in 1994
- rusk2 hours ago
  According to Wikipedia it was first shown to Scott McNeally, but according to Deutsch himself it was more like 92…
randfur2 hours ago
Do people actually believe these dot points or are they just out of scope for most applications to tackle beyond letting the user try again?
- rusk2 hours ago
  Perfect demonstration of the fallacies in action! If you were used to developing applications on a self contained platform you would think something like “sure, if it fails the user can try again”
  On a distributed system the user can only try again if the platform has remained stable, the failure is transient (*) and they have (crucially) have been given the information to retry.
  The platform that provides a stable environment for the user to just try again has been built on these principles.
  (*) there is one administrator assumes it is within the user’s power to resolve the issue
aussieguy12342 hours ago
This is highly relevant to the recent craze over microservices, which has settled down now (after un-neccasarily complicating systems at multiple companies).
- ruskan hour ago
  Micoserices or Monolith. It’s like being caught between the devil and the deep blue see. It’s a pity domain sockets never took off but I guess TCP/IP is the only truly cross platform IPC mechanism …
zephen5 hours ago
On the one hand, the list isn't wrong.
On the other hand, more fortunes have been made by assuming that physics will catch up (closely enough, anyway) to computational needs, than by assuming that every byte and every cycle and every nanosecond matters.
- shermantanktop4 hours ago
  Making money and being highly available are different goals.
  - rusk2 hours ago
    Stock markets and commercial Telecomms beg to differ
rusk2 hours ago
This article reiterates a lot of the Wikipedia stuff, while contradicting the main extant source which is Deutsch himself (https://se-radio.net/2021/07/episode-470-l-peter-deutsch-on-...). Nobody really knows who wrote the first four fallacies. They were just floating around it is Deutsch who pinned them down and it was Gosling’s endorsement that made them into the shibboleth that they are.