EDA followup

JJ commented on my earlier posting. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to have comments enabled, or I'd have responded there. (JJ, if you do have comments on that entry, let me know and I'll cross link).

Anyway, he talks about "the main failure of distributed computing is precisely the prevalent monotheism of traditional distributed computing approaches". Ignoring the fact that I don't believe distributed computing has failed, I think JJ read more into my posting than was intended. I didn't mean to suggest that any approach to distributed computing (e.g., RPC or message based) should be used to the exclusion of all others. I think I made that clear elsewhere too: you should use the best approach to hand. After all, isn't that what being a good engineer or architect is all about? I'm very fond of saying that one-size doesn't fit all, and by that I mean what I've just said. Of course systems exist that are entirely based on the concept of resources, services, events, RPC or message exchange, as examples. But there are examples of implementations that combine these different approaches very successfully too.

So in a way I disagree when JJ says "It is not being about fence sitting, or applying the right solution to a given problem." At this stage in computer science that is precisely what it is all about. However, I know what he's after and I've said elsewhere that in many ways computer science is a soft science and more of an art at the moment.

So looking forward, would I like to see a formal approach that combines all of the different approaches I've discussed to distributed computing, and which JJ mentions? Yes, I would. But would everyone use it in its entirety? No, of course they wouldn't: they would use the right aspect of it for the task at hand. Does that invalidate it? No. Does it offer an improvement over today? Yes. Is it going to happen soon? I doubt it, and I'm fairly sure JJ knows the reasons for that too (and the majority of them aren't technical). In fact I could probably write an entire article on that very subject because it relates to how close to a hard science computing science is and can come, with analogies between Galileo/religion and vendor values. But it's way too dark a subject to cover today.