Thanks, this is a helpful introduction to the history and literature of concepts related to time in distributed systems. Most people's concept of time is quite simple and they need to be
broken loose of some intuitively held, but unhelpful beliefs before
they can really do engineering with respect to time.
Is there a paper somewhere that new folk should read first? One that
includes:
- A tutorial to describe all of the things we think of as 'time',
e.g. order of sequence, etc. and their dependence on each other.
- The idea that time as it occurs in the physical world is
probabilistic - requiring such descriptors as precision (what is the
smallest difference we can discern), and error bounds or probability
distributions (how accurately can we describe it).
- And for the concrete thinkers who 'get' that true simultaneity is
impossible, an easy to understand example of how we succeed in
observing logical coherence, from the scale of a single CPU chip
(internally non-coherent, externally consistent) to cross-continent
compute clusters?
Well, time is complicated, but not for reasons that really matter to 99.95% of engineers (relativity and such). At its most basic level, Time is really just a monotonically increasing counter of seconds (or ms or ns or whatever). That's it.
The problem is really the cultural and societal layers on top of it. That's not Time's fault, its Our fault. A "Day" has to be 1 rotation of the earth around its axis, a "Year" has to be 1 rotation of the earth around the sun, etc.
Every unit of time at the Second and below is Simple. Every layer above it is Complex, including the counter of seconds from any date in the past, because Humans are Complex, not because Time is Complex. If we stopped caring that it always has to be cold in Winter (in the US) or that 7am is always morning (well, sunrise changes w.r.t both time and location), or that days are always (usually) 86400 seconds long, our interactions with time would be much simpler.
And, really, given that EVERY SINGLE UNIT above the second has not just some but many special case rules that are instantly confusing, maybe we should stop caring so much.
Unless you are for the reintroduction of wolves where you live your opinion on this is selfish. Too many wealthy urbanites and subutbanites have a not-in-my-backyard mentality about wolves.
I have not studied Go. I am learning Rust. I am not current with C++, but once was fluent. My take on Rust (as a Pythonista) is that while C++ is tedious and error-prone, Rust is merely tedious. Which IS progress. But... if you want to up-level, then I think the goal you seek depends on the state of the Rust crate ecosystem to get you out of the trenches.
Is there a paper somewhere that new folk should read first? One that includes:
- A tutorial to describe all of the things we think of as 'time', e.g. order of sequence, etc. and their dependence on each other.
- The idea that time as it occurs in the physical world is probabilistic - requiring such descriptors as precision (what is the smallest difference we can discern), and error bounds or probability distributions (how accurately can we describe it).
- And for the concrete thinkers who 'get' that true simultaneity is impossible, an easy to understand example of how we succeed in observing logical coherence, from the scale of a single CPU chip (internally non-coherent, externally consistent) to cross-continent compute clusters?