>Q: The Byzantine Generals Problem paper (1982) describes the first provably correct algorithm for making several computers agree when some of them may give deliberate wrong answers. What are the its practical applications?
>A: The only practical applications I know of are in real-time process control — in particular, for systems that fly airplanes.
"People fiercely resist any effort to make them change what they do. Given how bad they are at writing programs, one might naively expect programmers to be eager to try new approaches. But human psychology doesn’t work that way, and instead programmers will find any excuse to dismiss an approach that would require them to learn something new. On the other hand, they are quick to embrace the latest fad (extreme programming, templates, etc.) that requires only superficial changes and allows them to continue doing things basically the same as before. In this context, it is only fair to mention that people working in the area of verification are no less human than programmers, and they also are very reluctant to change what they do just because it isn’t working."
This is an excerpt from an answer about program verification. It's worth the read.
What took so long, indeed. As long as I have been associated with the ACM on behalf of the practitioner, I have complained about this to anyone and everyone. Many thought he had already won (!) and a few believed that he didn't deserve to win because he is "merely a popularizer" (!!), and some (rightfully, probably) encouraged me to inject myself in the process if I felt so strongly about it. There was no way I was going to do that, so I had resigned myself to a lifetime of merely complaining about it. I was elated to discover this morning that my complaining has been cut short, and that Lamport has won the award that is long overdue to him!
I'm embarrassed to include myself among the ignorant masses--I just assumed this was for his work on LaTeX. The distributed systems stuff sounds much more interesting though. Looks like I have some reading to do!
Yep. Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System is cited in basically every distributed systems paper ever, and the ideas in it are behind, among other things, Amazon's Dynamo.
It's also fairly accessible. One of the first systems papers I read, and while I certainly felt in over my head, I got the high level ideas
For me, the timing could not have been better; I'm to write and present a summary of that paper this week. It's an excellent paper, and while I am probably wrong, it feels like it defines the vocabulary for talking about time in computer systems. The very first episode of Star Trek: DS9 comes to mind; Captain Benjamin Sisco has met an alien species that does not exist in our system of linear time. Sisco cannot explain 'time' to the creature as he sees it as an innate part of communication. It is my belief that he would have a much better chance, had he read this paper.
Funny indeed! Even I had no clue about his contribution to LaTeX. I would imagine that his contribution to distributed systems far overshadows to that of LaTeX.
As with Donald Knuth, it's hard to say whether his most high-impact contribution was to computing and algorithms or to typesetting; certainly the latter is even more widely used.
"...certainly the latter is even more widely used"
There are lots of LaTeX users no doubt, but Lamport's work on the fundamentals of distributed systems informs the design all the large-scale systems relied on by billions of people.
Lamport's analysis of the limitations of time in distributed systems, and the Logical Clock construct to help with that is way more impactful than LaTeX.
While his work on distributed computing was certainly great, I find it curious that the press release doesn't even mention the achievement of Lamport that probably was important to lot more people: The creation of LaTeX. Sure, its not something typically honored by the Turing Award but leaving it out entirely? Come on!
Well, LaTeX is a (slight) improvement over TeX, which was written by D Knuth. I don't think that is what they would give a Turing Award to someone for.
Perhaps in terms of quantity, but to many he is the man who single-handedly brought order to distributed systems. I was surprised he had not won a Turing award yet.
About time too! This man is responsible for most of our progress in distributed systems. One of the few researchers Google hasn't poached from Microsoft yet.
Not sure why you seem to think researchers are flowing to Google. Microsoft Research is still the biggest name in distributed systems, if not CS in general. They have been consistently producing high-quality papers [1].
I do believe there is a flow of Systems researchers towards Google, at least from academia, if not Microsoft Research. I
Microsoft Research is active in many more areas of research than Google. However, I'm not sure that implies they are better than Google in the specific area of distributed systems research. FWIW, it seems every now and then Google publishes incredible papers that surprises folks in that community.
Aren't there like 4 other Turing award winners at MSR that also somehow escaped poaching (and are there any at Google)? I think you may have the wrong idea about where researchers would prefer to work...
Off the top of my head, there's at least one Turing Award winner at Google: Ken Thompson.
They have certainly successfully poached a bunch of awesome systems people from their positions in academia. I'm not sure how many from MS Research though.
This was very well deserved. Leslie has been one of my heroes ever since I came across his work while trying to write a functional lock manager for NFS. It was clear and very approachable.
