Reminds me of the clever hack of playing back TCP dump logs from prod on a test network, but dialed up. Neat.
Naturally I’d prefer professional programmers learn the cognitive tools for manageably reasoning about nondeterminism, but they’ve been around over half a century and it hasn’t happened yet.
What’s really interesting to me is that the simulation adequately replicates the real network. One of the more popular criticisms of analytical approaches is sone variant of: yeah, but the real network isn’t going to behave like your model. Which by the way is an entirely plausible concern for anyone who has messed with that layer.
> Naturally I’d prefer professional programmers learn the cognitive tools for manageably reasoning about nondeterminism
It’s not an either-or here, though. Part of the challenge is you’re not always thinking about all the non-determinisms in your code, and the interconnections between your code and other code (whose behavior you can sometimes only assume) can make that close to impossible. Part of that is the “your model of the network” critique, but also part of that is “your model of how people will use your software” isn’t necessarily correct either.
What is interesting here is that the solution could fuzz-test anything, including the network model, leading to failures even more implausible than reality.
Naturally I’d prefer professional programmers learn the cognitive tools for manageably reasoning about nondeterminism, but they’ve been around over half a century and it hasn’t happened yet.
What’s really interesting to me is that the simulation adequately replicates the real network. One of the more popular criticisms of analytical approaches is sone variant of: yeah, but the real network isn’t going to behave like your model. Which by the way is an entirely plausible concern for anyone who has messed with that layer.