Are Efficiency and Horizontal Scalability at odds? • Buttondown
Why are scalable systems locally-inefficent, and locally-efficient systems unscalable? Plus, new book release!| buttondown.com
Why are scalable systems locally-inefficent, and locally-efficient systems unscalable? Plus, new book release!| buttondown.com
I like how easy it is to configure neovim. Last month I wanted a task runner for a very particular use-case that none of the available plugins handled. So I wrote my own. Show Code This is not good code. vim.g.global_task = {} function LoadTask(cmd, num, silent) local tmp = vim.g.global_task -- (a) if not num then num = vim.tbl_count(vim.g.global_task) + 1 end tmp[tonumber(num)] = cmd -- (a) vim.| Hillel Wayne
Complexity is bad. Simple software is better than complex software. But software is complex for a reason. While people like coming up with grand theories of complexity (Simple Made Easy, No Silver Bullet) there’s very little info out there on the nitty-gritty specific sources of complexity. Without that, all the theories feel to me like the four elements theory. We just don’t have the data needed to come up with something more predictive.| Hillel Wayne
In my 2021 TLAConf Talk I introduced a technique for encoding abstract data types (ADTs). For accessibility I’m reproducing it here. This post is aimed at intermediate-level TLA+ users who already understand action properties and the general concept of refinement. Say we want to add a LIFO stack to a specification. You can push to and pop from the end of this stack but you cannot change data in the middle.| Hillel Wayne
Alloy is a powerful formal specification language, but it’s historically been weak at modeling concurrency. AWS raised this as a critical issue for why they went with TLA+. Alloy writers built a lot of tricks to emulate time, but it can feel like you’re working against the language. Alloy 6 aims to change that with built-in temporal operators. Right now it’s poorly documented, and since I maintain the alloydocs, I sat down and figured it all out.| Hillel Wayne
