Why a metaphor? Why this metaphor?

The paxos paper is the weirdest framing device I've have personnally seen in a published white paper. It muddies understanding, mixes up technical terms, and obscures the core ideas. So the question is how the fuck this happend.

So lets give some context. In 1982 Lamport wrote "The Byzantine Generals Problem" which was published in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. It too had a framing device to explain the problem. But it was mostly concise and well defined. Paxos, not so much

You must understand, Leslie Lamport is a dork. I mean this affectionaly but that's the truth. He transliterated his collegues names in pigeon greek, he dressed up as Indian Jones when he first presented the paper. He doesn't take himself seriously. But this also has the flaw of obscuring what the paper is getting at. Which when dealing with complicated math proofs helps nobody.

And this was how most people felt. Paxos was originally written in 1989 but was rejected by ACM for being hard to follow, they told him to cut the greek, he didn't and so it sat. Till 1998. A full nine years later. So explains the additional framing.

Opening

This submission was recently discovered behind a filing cabinet in the TOCS editorial office. Despite its age, the editor-in-chief felt that it was worth publishing. Because the author is currently doing field work in the Greek isles and cannot be reached, Iwas asked to prepare it for publication. The author appears to be an archeologist with only a passing interest in computer science. This is unfortunate; even though the obscure ancient Paxon civilization he describes is of little interest to most computer scientists, its legislative system is an excellent model for how to implement a distributed computer system in an asynchronous environment. Indeed, some of the refinements the Paxons made to their protocol appear to be unknown in the systems literature. The author does give a brief discussion of the Paxon Parliament’s relevance to distributed computing in Section 4. Computer scientists will probably want to read that section first. Even before that, they might want to read the explanation of the algorithm for computer scientists by Lampson [1996]. The algorithm is also described more formally by De Prisco et al. [1997]. Ihave added further comments on the relation between the ancient protocols and more recent work at the end of Section 4. Keith Marzullo University of California, San Diago

LAMPORT, P. 2 — Introduction

Lamport himself also explained how the framing and delayed publication happened:

Leslie Lamport, historical remarks

I submitted the paper to TOCS in 1990. All three referees said that the paper was mildly interesting... but that all the Paxos stuff had to be removed. I was quite annoyed at how humorless everyone working in the field seemed to be, so I did nothing with the paper... As a way of both carrying on the joke and saving myself work, I suggested that instead of my writing a revision, it be published as a recently rediscovered manuscript, with annotations by Keith Marzullo.

MS Research