PWL #17.5: Immutability Changes Everything

[Hi fellow paper lovers! One of my favorite paper-lovers, Pat Helland, is going to be in town later this month, and we talked him into doing a PWL while he's here! It's kind of cheating because he loves a paper that he wrote, but he got shoehorned into this by well-meaning fan-persons without much time to prepare so I'll still count it :)]

http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2015/Papers/CIDR15_Paper16.pdf

Abstract:

"There is an inexorable trend towards storing and sending immutable data. We need immutability to coordinate at a distance and we can afford immutability, as storage gets cheaper.

This paper is simply an amuse-bouche on the repeated patterns of computing that leverage immutability. Climbing up and down the compute stack really does yield a sense of déjà vu all over again."

Who is this Pat person?

"Pat Helland has been implementing transaction systems, databases, application platforms, distributed systems, fault-tolerant systems, and messaging systems since 1978. For recreation, he occasionally writes technical papers. He currently works at Salesforce."