> Am I totally missing something or hasn't been the binary RPC > of that style been dead ever since SUNRPC? Hasn't the eulogy > been delivered by CORBA? Haven't folks realized that S-exprs > are really quite good for data serialization in the heterogeneous > environments (especially when they are called JSON) and you > really shouldn't be made to figure out how large is the integer > on a host foo?
i'm sure i'll be flamed into nothingness for this, but a lot of what the supposedly cutting edge does these days seems to me to be exactly what we were taught only those reprobate mainframers did in unix' heyday. the stuff i've seen recently seems fragile and special purpose. i didn't see any ideas i recognized in the gfs interview. i missed the organizing principles of gfs, except if they are to just to go fast. it all seems to hark back to the days mainframers put disk addresses in their data. if we're going back there, just take me out back and shoot me now. i want to remember some progress in computer science. i maintain just a flicker of hope that computer guys are bad at history. the days of mach seemed especially dark, too. - erik
