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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

> Additionally there are some clients that treat each message input by the user as a retriable thing in isolation, which is also clearly incorrect. If I send two messages and the first fails to go through, I almost certainly don't want to retry the second until the first has gone through, otherwise my client has literally sent out of order messages!

I don't think that's clearly incorrect. If you sent two messages you presumably want them to be two messages and they should be retried as such. If what you wanted to send was a single, multi-line message, surely you would have just done that?

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Human communications are more naunced than DB transactions. If I forget to mention something important I send a new message rather than editing the already sent one, to make sure I catch their attention. Edits can go unnoticed. Imagine this scenario:

[12:00 / sent] Sell the house.

[12:05 / failed] Please feed the baby.

[12:06 / sent] Oh and the cat too.

Now the receiver's going to sell my cat [example inspired by The Art of Multiprocessor Programming].

They sure are, but I hate when slack combines my messages when I wanted two separate messages on purpose. If i send two messages, it's because I did it on purpose.

Not at all. The separation of messages is part of communication, not me trying to game a network protocol. Maybe it's to emphasise a point, maybe it's to time a joke, maybe it's to send a photo and a text message separately.

I think you are perhaps not aware of how people use messaging apps in the real world. Many people (myself included, sometimes) will break sentences or sentence fragments into different messages. If the messages are displayed out of order on the recipient's side, it would be pretty hard to understand.

And even in the case where people do tend to send one complete thought per message, it still matters: like maybe I send a message, and then have an extra thought, and send a follow-up message that clarifies my first message. If they are displayed out of order, that will be confusing.

Even if two messages are completely unrelated and completely separate thoughts (honestly this feels like a much less common case than the alternative), messages just should be displayed in the order they were sent, because that's what reflects reality best.

> If what you wanted to send was a single, multi-line message, surely you would have just done that?

No. danpalmer is correct; the break between messages is an integral part of the communication.

I break up my messages, as do many people.

Do you do so with the expectation that they might arrive out of order, or one fails?

Out of order no, failing and having to manually re-send which makes it out of order is acceptable.

I find that unacceptable and frustrating, personally. If a message fails to send, I want the client to hold back any later messages until the failed message is resolved somehow. It should auto-retry and (hopefully) eventually succeed, or I can manually delete it and "release" the following messages.

I do so with the expectation that they should arrive in order if no one fails, but apparently it is "debatable" if this is a reasonable expectation

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