Hacker News Reader

Comment by Monkeyget | Hacker News Reader

Clock, Byzantine general, Paxos, LaTeX, program proof. My CS curriculum often crossed Leslie Lamport's path.

Here is an interview he did a while ago which go trough his work : http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/05/03/an-interview-with-lesl...

View on HN

Quote from that interview:

>Q: The Byzantine Generals Problem paper (1982) describes the first provably correct algorithm for making several computers agree when some of them may give deliberate wrong answers. What are the its practical applications?

>A: The only practical applications I know of are in real-time process control — in particular, for systems that fly airplanes.

I guess Bitcoin didn't exist at the time..

"People fiercely resist any effort to make them change what they do. Given how bad they are at writing programs, one might naively expect programmers to be eager to try new approaches. But human psychology doesn’t work that way, and instead programmers will find any excuse to dismiss an approach that would require them to learn something new. On the other hand, they are quick to embrace the latest fad (extreme programming, templates, etc.) that requires only superficial changes and allows them to continue doing things basically the same as before. In this context, it is only fair to mention that people working in the area of verification are no less human than programmers, and they also are very reluctant to change what they do just because it isn’t working."

This is an excerpt from an answer about program verification. It's worth the read.

There is another good interview: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/d...

Mine as well. Reading his papers was always a pleasure as he has a knack for making the complicated accessible and interesting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com