I'd be curious to see what from this set Adrian Colyer https://blog.acolyer.org/ has already digested.

A perhaps interesting follow on would be to see which of these programming models are manifest today across the big cloud services .. or how they have advanced from this legacy work.

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/linear-logic.ht...

I will warn you that the latter two references make several arguments and then discuss uniqueness typing (which is related but very different) and that is a whole other rabbit hole of sources, but generally a good topic to dig into as well.

[1] https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/lineartaste/lin...

[2] http://edsko.net/2017/01/08/linearity-in-haskell/

[3] https://youtu.be/t0mhvd3-60Y

https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368

man what a bastion of intelligent discussion this place is.

So the honest question is: should we subject industry e.g. blogs to the same standard as the academy. I would think we should hold academic products to a much higher standard. I do agree criticism should be constructive. (One of PRs for example noted lack of mention of CSP.)

Honestly, for me right now, coming from HN into random places, no I don't have different standards. But in a course having a textbook recommendation, yes, the standards are very different.

Anyway, you are out on a tangent. The work should be judged based on its quality, and for all the dimensions quality has, the presentation format is not one that matters.

who is we? are you a tt prof at literally the number 1 cs school in the US? are you a reviewer for any distributed journals? the author of this book is a wildly successful researcher. why should i trust literally almost anyone's here opinion over their opinion?

If you think it's possible for a large, public internet forum not to get a lot of ignorant or shitty comments, that's extremely mistaken. What's necessary is for people who know more to post better ones. Since you seem to know more, you should be helping with that, not adding to the bottom of the barrel by dumping on it.

There are excellent comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22710928 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22709644. I'm sure you could write something better if you tried. Indeed, you occasionally have done so.

why is it that the tech subs at reddit don't have the same kind of policing you practice here and are just as productive? i wonder if it's because community policing is more effective than whatever brand of dictatorial policing you practice here hmmmmmm. the only difference between the moderation here and at reddit that i see is your self-importance and the effect it has on anyone who feels they're part of the same self-important rarefied club.

I'm gonna repeat what I've said many times: by enforcing a strict decorum what you actually accomplish, and I mean exactly you dang, is give the air/pretense of intellectualism without any of the substance. Hence the constant barrage of hypercritical (but superficial) disparaging comments. It's like any other system that privileges one type of language - those that can deploy it effectivity feel empowered and emboldened because they feel they are the defacto ethical/just/concordant.

If you wanted proscribe things for the betterment of the community you should proscribe content (e.g. hate speech) rather than language.

edit:

this comment is the exemplar par excellence of what your rules produce:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17034295

for many hours it was the highest ranking comment on that post. it is pure invective cloaked in "constructive criticism". it took me pointing outing how absolutely rude it was for it to start bubbling down. i'm not a hero. i'm simply pointing out that it is absolutely necessary to point out when someone is being rude.

The whole book is written in Markdown. This is a huge red flag for me and the book goes in to the "no" pile pretty much immediately.

Distributed computation is a complex and complicated discipline. Moreover if you're going to write a book and you don't even realize that Markdown is completely inappropriate it calls in to question your authoring skills.

At best the use of Markdown is lazy.

If you are an expert in distributed computation I assume that you're probably capable of using LaTeX, DocBook, *roff, or some other appropriate technical authoring system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Dismissing content because it's written in markdown without providing good reasons, such as quality of content or specifically how the presentation hinders proper communication is indeed quite lazy. If you want people to take you seriously, please try to be more precise in your criticism.

nothing. the person you're responding to just wants to feel very good about themselves without actually engaging with the material.

If you're posting to HN, you're responsible for helping to take care of this place, to the best of your ability and awareness. If others are wrong, correct them respectfully. If they are ignorant, teach them. If you know more, share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. Being an asshole and tearing others down helps no one, and worsens the very things you're complaining about.

I'm sure you wouldn't litter in a city park just because others do, nor would you fail to put out a campfire just because you were mad at other campers. Please bring those values here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

you seem to be oblivious to the fact that i don't care (hence the throwaway).

you can't because i fundamentally disagree with you and i have zero incentive to abide

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

One thing that feels off to me as a backend engineer that deals with distributed systems in practice is no treatment (AFAICT) of containers/virtual machines and how tools like kubernetes are providing the primitives that the distributed languages of the past provided. In general I think chapter 4 doesn't have a cohesive narrative on its treatment of languages for distributed computation. I know this is messy topic but I think more could be done to tie things to current art.

If I were to make a prediction, there's general trend towards protocols (mostly network level above layer 4) being the actual thing of interest for distributed computation, not single language runtimes. Wire-compatible DBs like AWS aurora and MySQL are an example, but also I think things like container orchestator's liveness and readiness checks over HTTP. As more primitives rally around the same core concepts, I think the general trend will be to go from conceptual similarity, to client library compatability (e.g. identical interfaces a la OpenTracing <> Lightstep, Jaeger) and eventually wire/protocol compatibility. Language runtimes are too much of a moving target as there are other pressures at play (community, tooling, typing, yes even syntax) that go into language choices over a decade.