I like how the Wikipedia entry for this still hasn't been updated.
Who invented vector clocks?
21–30 of 40 posts
Re: Who invented vector clocks?
#22> So, the current version of the Wikipedia page on vector clocks is wrong, or at least misleading, about the origin of the idea, and it’s kind of my fault. No. 0% fault of the author and 100% the fault of the Wikipedia editor. Generally speaking, people who are unwilling to ensure the accuracy of their work don't deserve the privilege to do that work.
As usual, a (semi-)relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/978/ (Citogenesis)
Re: Who invented vector clocks?
#23I get the feeling this was written specifically to have something to cite in a wikipedia correction.
Re: Who invented vector clocks?
#24This is a good example of how academic citation practices subtly launder out the role of compute, trial-and-error, and practitioners in favor of academia. OP concludes that if you want to cite Fidge & Mattern for credit for 'developing the theory ', that's fine. But notice, that's not how it started and is an answer to a different - no one was asking, 'who finally explained why vector clocks work in a rigorous way',…
Even “who was the first person to mention X in a publication” can be different from “who invented X”. Inventions can fly around the industry for awhile before they get documented, and it is unclear who really invented them, or perhaps they were invented multiple times independently.
Re: Who invented vector clocks?
#25This is a good example of how academic citation practices subtly launder out the role of compute, trial-and-error, and practitioners in favor of academia. OP concludes that if you want to cite Fidge & Mattern for credit for 'developing the theory ', that's fine. But notice, that's not how it started and is an answer to a different - no one was asking, 'who finally explained why vector clocks work in a rigorous way',…
Even “who was the first person to mention X in a publication” can be different from “who invented X”. Inventions can fly around the industry for awhile before they get documented, and it is unclear who really invented them, or perhaps they were invented multiple times independently.
I'd wager that the first person to mention an idea in a publication is almost never the originator of the idea. The obstacles for publishing something are so enormously high that the effort to publish is often much larger than the effort to invent the thing being published.
As a result, academia and industrial science are largely institutions that formalize and describe ideas, not institutions where ideas originate, even though those ideas are often (wrongly) attributed to them.
It's even worse in the humanities, of course. I can pretty much guarantee that no philosophical idea was first conceived by the person it is usually attributed to. Most of those ideas are ultimately so trivial that countless people probably had them in the Stone Age already.
Re: Who invented vector clocks?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Generally speaking, people who are unwilling to ensure the accuracy of their work don't deserve the privilege to do that work. This is all volunteer labor. Anyone can be a volunteer if they'd like. Wikipedia encourages mistakes (or "boldness") and assumes that due to a network of volunteers and the density of interest, an article will eventually become better. Programming docs in open source often have errors. Do t…
> This is all volunteer labor. Anyone can be a volunteer if they'd like. Wikipedia encourages mistakes (or "boldness") and assumes that due to a network of volunteers and the density of interest, an article will eventually become better. The accuracy of an article depends on the effort (or ability) for contributors to check facts more than its "density of interest". In other words, experts find this easier than amate…
> [...] for most topics I think many would rather see no article than a crap one.
I'm sure that many people would support just the opposite. And in the case of Wikipedia, it is even more probable: the first person who finds the weak points in an article can (and often does) add comments (or - nowadays - opinions on the discussion page), which usually instigate discussion and corrections.
Of course, in the case of scientific articles, the practices are different, and your statement holds. However, IMO Wikipedia only struggles to get as close as possible to the role of a real encyclopedia, and definitely isn't (and won't be) Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica.
Re: Who invented vector clocks?
#27Whoever it was I guarantee they didn't publish an academic paper. They shipped their product, then probably spent a few years fixing convergence bugs ;)
Re: Who invented vector clocks?
#28The same happens in work place as well, when multiple people have similar ideas and it is unclear or impossible to credit who came up with the idea first. It is often the case that people with shared context had similar ideas independently when facing the same set of problems. I have the impression that it is controversial about who invented the hybrid logical clock first as well. Although most people cite the Kulkan…
In the work place a manager will heroically claim credit.
Re: Who invented vector clocks?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Generally speaking, people who are unwilling to ensure the accuracy of their work don't deserve the privilege to do that work. This is all volunteer labor. Anyone can be a volunteer if they'd like. Wikipedia encourages mistakes (or "boldness") and assumes that due to a network of volunteers and the density of interest, an article will eventually become better. Programming docs in open source often have errors. Do t…
> This is all volunteer labor. Anyone can be a volunteer if they'd like. Wikipedia encourages mistakes (or "boldness") and assumes that due to a network of volunteers and the density of interest, an article will eventually become better. The accuracy of an article depends on the effort (or ability) for contributors to check facts more than its "density of interest". In other words, experts find this easier than amate…
> What I will say is that the code review process for a pull request usually includes making sure docs are updated accordingly. Much of that documentation might even be automatically generated from structured comments and validated by passing tests such as in API docs.
I’ve contributed code to a few open source projects…this is true for exactly zero of them — blender, at least, tried to have accurate python documentation.
Re: Who invented vector clocks?
#30The same happens in work place as well, when multiple people have similar ideas and it is unclear or impossible to credit who came up with the idea first. It is often the case that people with shared context had similar ideas independently when facing the same set of problems. I have the impression that it is controversial about who invented the hybrid logical clock first as well. Although most people cite the Kulkan…
In the work place a manager will heroically claim credit.
If that happens, raise it his boss. If that doesn't work and you feel like vomiting on your mgr's face, do it. Don't hold back.