Questioning the Lambda Architecture (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Questioning the Lambda Architecture (2014)

oreilly.com

36 pointsjxub14 comments

If you’re interested in stuff like this, check out “streaming 101: the world beyond batch”[1], it’s a great blog post series about exactly once event time streaming.

And keep an eye on OctoSQL[2] too, as we’ll soon be making a big release making everything streaming friendly (with pure sql obviously!).

We’ve been really inspired with articles like this one.

[1]: https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-world-beyond-batch-streami...

[2]: https://github.com/cube2222/octosql

Why are developers continually attributing new meaning to old terms? This has nothing to do with Lambda Calculus, anonymous functions, or Lisp. Why call it Lambda Architecture?

I don't think that the people who invented the term "Lambda Architecture" did so because they thought it was a good technical summary.

Because people tend to want a nicely-sounding, familiar-looking name. So they reuse the same set of familiar words. They get overburdened with meanings, but also even more familiar-sounding.

It takes some guts and talent to name something with an alien, original word, like Google, or Atari, or Motorola.

Google is derived from googol, Atari is a japanese word, not sure if Motorola is derivative though.

I was curious too - "Paul Galvin wanted a brand name for Galvin Manufacturing Corporation's new car radio, and created the name “Motorola” by linking "motor" (for motorcar) with "ola" (from Victrola), which was also a popular ending for many companies at the time, e.g. Moviola, Crayola."

Neither "googol" nor "atari" (a very clever Japanese import) were common English words. Stuff like "lambda", or "spark", or "react" are more or less everyday words, with well-established previous everyday meanings.

I believe the Lambda Architecture is a simplified refinement of a previous idea, the Kappa Architecture. It's just one letter further along. I have no idea why a Kappa Architecture was named as such.

The Kappa architecture succeeds the Lambda architecture. This article not only says that, but is the origin of the new term.

I really want to read this, but the column width is narrow, like a newspaper column. Why is this format so popular?

Doesn't look that way to me on MacOS Chrome or Firefox, the text width is normal/typical.

Isn’t this basically part of CQRS?

CQRS is just treating reads and writes differently along any particular dimension of your app.

This seems more like a janky solution for being able to reprocess streams after the code has changed in order to recompute results.

> Isn’t this basically part of CQRS?

We're you thinking of event sourcing?

https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com