Waldo: Excellent!

Being currently beached and briefly free of family life, I had some time to catch up on my reading. This one really filled a gap in my knowledge of distributed computing and its history.

I was in a conversation once that only now makes proper sense. The phrase "Waldo taught is that" was used in a discussion about REST, which puzzled me - I hadn't heard of Waldo except for the fellow in the striped sweater. Later I was reading some notes from QCon via Steve Vinoski's blog, and again the mysterious Wally was mentioned. And finally a quick googling turns up a reference from Uncle Bob and his friends on their list of reading recommendations. Now I can't ignore Wally any longer.

Waldo et al. described the impedance mismatch of language abstractions and distributed computing in this 1994 thesis. And I am regretting it took 15 years before I read it, as it makes some very straight forward arguments - things I wish I had been more aware of in past. In fact, thinking back, in 2002 I took a course which featured CORBA, and I was very impressed with it at the time.

Qouting from the abstract: "We argue that objects that interact in a distributed system need to be dealt with in ways that are intrinsically different from objects that interact in a single address space. These differences are required because distributed systems require that the programmer be aware of latency, have a different model of memory access, and take into account issues of concurrency and partial failure".

So if you are doing any web/ SOA/ remoting at all, you really should go find Wally and get some extra context.