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Hints for Computer System Design Alive

Hints for Computer System Design
KindPaper
Published1983
StatusAlive
AuthorsButler Lampson
FieldSystems
Sourcewww.microsoft.com ↗

Lampson's SOSP talk — do one thing well, use hints, cache everything, keep the interface narrow. The most-quoted design advice ever given in fifteen pages.

Created by Butler Lampson

Lampson's collected design maxims, presented at SOSP 1983: separate functionality from implementation hints, cache aggressively, use end-to-end arguments, keep interfaces 'simple, fast and complete.' Each hint distilled a decade of Alto, Ethernet, and distributed systems design.

The paper's real contribution is the doctrine of hints — 'a hint is data that can be wrong and still useful' — which underlies every cache, every name-service shortcut, every soft-state optimization in modern systems. It reads like engineering distilled to aphorism.

Sources

  1. microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/hints-for-computer-system-design/
  2. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/773379.806614
  3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler_Lampson