On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 11:41 AM, Uri Guttman <[email protected]> wrote: > On 05/04/2012 02:07 PM, Federico Lucifredi wrote: > >> Pragmatic Programmers has just announced a book on distributed > > programming in Ruby. Somewhat the possibility never occurred to me :) > >> I am wondering, is there some obvious reason, like a well-structured >> library or language property, that makes one of the dynamic languages >> a better option that the others for distributed computing? I am not >> thinking HPC, more like remote method invocation. > > it is much easier than most people realize. the key is a simple message > passing api. that allows for local or remote calls without changing the > code. then you can do your work in one process or distributed with little > extra help. this is a library thing and not something needed in the > language. so the quality of the library matters as much as anything else and > that means knowing how to design such a beast.
I disagree on the importance of "without changing the code". However I do agree on the importance of the remote invocation API, and there are a number of subtle requirements on the API that people seldom get right. For instance I guarantee that some day in any complex system, you will have intermittent performance problems. When they happen, you need to have tools to be able to stay on top of that and track down the location of a performance problem, that may occur sporadically several remote calls away. If you don't do this, it is just a question of time until normal minor mistakes accumulate to take your distributed house of cards down. _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
