Comment by jsrozner

3 days ago

Perhaps it’s that a global solution in the language of set theory was hard to find, but distributed systems — which need to provide guarantees only from local node behavior, without access to global — offered an alternate perspective. They weren’t designed to do so but they ended up being useful.

> They weren’t designed to do so but they ended up being useful.

an object doing something that it wasn’t designed for seems to me to be the definition of “surprising”