←back to thread

Distributed systems programming has stalled

(www.shadaj.me)
287 points shadaj | 5 comments | 27 Feb 25 16:12 UTC | HN request time: 1.089s | source
Show context
hinkley ◴[27 Feb 25 17:43 UTC] No.43196596[source]▶
I am so appalled every time I ask a group of devs and get the same answer that I’ve just stopped asking. How many of you took a distributed programming class in college? And it turns out yet again that not only am I the only one, but that none of them recollect it even being in the course catalog.

For me it was a required elective (you must take at least one of these 2-3 classes). And I went to college while web browsers were being invented.

When Cloud this and Cloud that started every university should have added it to the program. What the fuck is going on with colleges?

replies(3): >>43196651 #>>43196729 #>>43196974 #
1. shermantanktop ◴[27 Feb 25 17:59 UTC] No.43196729[source]▶
My .02 is that any topic sufficiently important shouldn't be left to colleges. You can force feed a complex topic to a bunch of undergrads, but they will forget 95% of it, and 5 years later they'll say "ohhh, I think I have a textbook on that in my parents' basement."

The reality is that most of this profession is learned on the job, and college acts as a filter at the start of the funnel. If someone is not capable of picking up the Paxos paper, then having had someone tell them about it 5 years ago when they had a hangover won't help.

replies(1): >>43196975 #
2. hinkley ◴[27 Feb 25 18:24 UTC] No.43196975[source]▶
I am 100% convinced we could delete the compiler class from college curricula and replace it with distributed computing and the world would be a better place.
replies(1): >>43197624 #
3. bigmutant ◴[27 Feb 25 19:32 UTC] No.43197624[source]▶
Def agree. Most people will never touch an Abstract Syntax Tree or even Expression Trees. Almost everyone working in back-end will use Cloud Services, will make mistakes based on assumptions of what they provide
replies(1): >>43199740 #
4. EtCepeyd ◴[27 Feb 25 23:26 UTC] No.43199740{3}[source]▶
I was studying for my MSc in CS some 25 years ago. Our curriculum included both automata/formal languages (multiple courses over multiple semesters) and parallel programming.

The latter course (a) was built on a mathematical formalism that had been developed at the university proper and not used anywhere else, (b) used PVM: <https://www.netlib.org/pvm3/>, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Virtual_Machine>, for labs.

Since then, I've repeatedly felt that I've seriously benefited from my formal languages courses, while the same couldn't be said about my parallel programming studies. PVM is dead technology (I think it must have counted as "nearly dead" right when we were using it). And the only aspect I recall about the formal parallel stuff is that it resembles nothing that I've read or seen about distributed and/or concurrent programming ever since.

A funny old memory regarding PVM. (This was a time when we used landlines with 56 kbit/s modems and pppd to dial in to university servers.) I bought a cheap second computer just so I could actually "distribute" PVM over a "cluster". For connecting both machines, I used linux's PLIP implementation. I didn't have money for two ethernet cards. IIRC, PLIP allowed for 40 kbyte/s transfers! <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Line_Internet_Protoco...>

replies(1): >>43207801 #
5. bigmutant ◴[28 Feb 25 16:59 UTC] No.43207801{4}[source]▶
Sure, I did the same, BS/MS with a focus on Compilers/Programming Languages. It's been personally gratifying to understand programming "end-to-end" and to solve some tricky problems, but 99% of folks aren't going to hit those problems. There are tons of people interacting with Cloud Services every day that aren't aware of the basic issues like:

- Consistency models (can I really count on data being there? What do I have to do to make sure that stale reads/write conflicts don't occur?)

- Transactions (this has really fallen off, especially in larger companies outside of BI/Analytics)

- Causality (how can I handle write conflicts at the App Layer? Are there Data Structures ie CDTs that can help in certain cases?)

Even basic things like "use system time/monotonic clocks to measure elapsed time instead of wall-clock time" aren't well known, I've personally corrected dozens of CRs for this. Yes this can be built in to libs, AI agents etc but it never seems to actually be, and I see the same issues repeated over-and-over. So something is missing at the education layer