Have Emacs - Will Hack

David Gelernter on the cloud

Topic: Distributed systems

I previously posted a review of Nicholas Carriero and David Gelernter's How to Write Parallel Programs. Today I came across an Edge roundtable discussion on cloud computing featuring David Gelernter, John Markoff, and Clay Shirky (via Patrick Logan).

I recommend reading up more on Gelernter's work if you are not familiar with it before watching the interview.

For me, there were three new insights from the roundtable:

• Message passing is the assembly language of distributed systems.
• Databases are a way to communicate through time. Networks are a way to communicate through space. Both are symmetrical. The point of the Linda programming language was to unify them.
• Botnets are the most powerful computers today, and are built using some of the newest distributed systems techniques.

Gelernter also discussed Eric Freeman's Lifestreams architecture. Freeman's work on Lifestreams from 1994 to 1996 was amazingly prescient for how FriendFeed, Twitter, and the recent Facebook redesign all work over a decade later.