Hemingway and FLP


Yesterday, I have finished reading For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. It is not only because the book is written by a Nobel Prize winner that it is worth reading, it is a very interesting and thought provoking book about the human nature. My impression is that the book becomes more and more exciting as it comes to the end.

Anyway, the main goal of this post is not solely discuss my impressions about this Hemingway's book. The fact is that for several chapters the main character faces a dilemma, which is in my opinion the same challenge faced by those building reliable distributed systems, this is explained by a great paper well known as - FLP. :-)

(Un)fortunately, Robert Jordan could not have access, at that time, to the ground breaking paper by Fisher, Lynch and Patterson (Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process) to shed some light (or darkness, perhaps) on his situation.

Definitely, both works are great references...