Strange Loop Conference
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2016–2019
52:29 · 59K views · Sep 26, 2015
Peter Alvaro's Strange Loop 2015 talk argues that query languages let you state what you mean, and applies that to distributed programming. It covers Datalog, Dedalus and the Bloom lineage for reasoning about distributed systems.
Recommended as a fantastic introduction to declarative and Datalog-based distributed systems and failure modeling.
12 comments from Hacker News
Not anything I’d want to use. The closest is prolog. But at a higher level this is what Eve attempted to do. Eve was built using the semantics of Dedalus which is built from datalog. I highly recommend watching Peter Alvaro’s Strangeloop talk about creating Dedalus - it’s exactly the same train of thought you’re onto. this video
For an introduction to Dedalus with less reading, Peter Alvaro's 2015 Strange Loop talk was fantastic. this video --- Edit: Actually Chris Granger gave an Eve talk at the same conference. It's interesting to see how Eve has evolved since. [LINK]
Your language example, and the burger example seems flipped. I assume you prefer artisan burgers, which means you like no language restrictions. Badly chosen restrictions are not good, we can all agree. But what do good restrictions look like? Back in the day, programmers prided themselves on being able to do their own memory management, and bristled at the idea of a compiler or the runtime doing it for them. Now, that's the exception, as most of the time, we don't think about memory management in most languages we program in. As time marches on, we'll find more of these restrictions that we all eventually agree are good practices, and the next generation of programmers will take it as a given in programming. As a look beyond functional programming restrictions, I encourage you to check out Peter Alvaro's talk on Distributed Systems. Here, he talks about how queries over distributed systems is really hard to reason about, because time is now relative--there's no central clock to measure time. However, if we restrict ourselves to a language whose queries cannot express negation, a lot of the hard stuff about distributed systems go away. this video
Also: I see what you mean: this video and Applying Failure Testing Research @Netflix: [LINK] both by Peter Alvaro (second also includes Kolton Andrus) are thought-provoking looks at failure modeling in distributed systems.
If model-theoretic semantics and the various ways to slice, dice, and extend Datalog are interesting to you, then almost any talk by Peter Alvaro might be as well. In particular: this video