Comment by flakiness

At a glance, Ray is a re-invention (or rebranding) of distributed object system plus agent, which was popular around '90-'00. Things like Java RMI and CORBA (remember?) was part of the trend, until REST killed them all.

On top of the distributed object foundation, Ray added a ML-oriented twists like efficient numerical data transfer with Apache Arrow, and shifted focus from (classic) agent system to RL, or general distributed ML training in general, accompanied by the Python-first approach - which simplifies a lot of things compared to traditional, often language-agnostic distributed objects.

I'm not claiming Ray is not novel. Rather, my point is that what a dated idea needs to come back may be just some relevant-today twists like these. I think Ray is good demonstration of possibility of such old new things.