Fooled by expediency, saved by duality
Erik Meijer · 2010
Serendipitously, I recently picked up a copy of the book "Leadership and Self-Deception" at my local thrift store. According to Wikipedia "Self-deception is a process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument." While reading the book, it occurred to me that I unknowingly minimized and repressed the fallacies of distributed programming and the CAP theorem in my own work on "Democratizing the Cloud". Instead redirecting the forces that distribution imposes on the design of systems to create the simplest possible, and correct, solution, I foolishly tried to attack them directly thereby making things more difficult than necessary, and of course ultimately fail. Fortunately, I found redemption for my sins by turning to math. By judicious use of categorical duality, literally reversing the arrows, we show how scalable is the dual of non-scalable. The result is a scalable and compositional approach to building distributed systems that we believe is so simple it can be applied by the average developer.