>"Hercules went to King Augeas, and without telling anything about Eurystheus, said that he would clean out the stables in one day, if Augeas would give him a tenth of his fine cattle.
Augeas couldn't believe his ears, but promised. Hercules brought Augeas's son along to watch. First the hero tore a big opening in the wall of the cattle-yard where the stables were. Then he made another opening in the wall on the opposite side of the yard.
Next, he dug wide trenches to two rivers which flowed nearby. He turned the course of the rivers into the yard. The rivers rushed through the stables, flushing them out, and all the mess flowed out the hole in the wall on other side of the yard."
PDS: See, King Augeas was expecting that Hercules would clean up the stables the old-fashioned way -- by using his strength to clean them out manually.
King Augeas was expecting that Hercules work hard for him.
Hercules did work hard, but additionally, Hercules also worked smart -- by digging only what was necessary to direct the river or rivers -- and letting the flowing water, letting nature itself -- do all of the work!
Now compare this to MapReduce.
Compare this to Jeff Dean of Google, and all that he does.
Jeff Dean and MapReduce leverage computation power (think of them as the streams of water) -- to do all of the "Heavy Lifting".
They work hard -- but they also work smart.
They utilize an infrastructure (Hercules with the water from a river, Jeff Dean wtih the power from distributed computing/distributed queries/MapReduce, etc.) which when skillfully directed, at their hands, performs all of the hard work for them...
They work smart.
Now this being said, I'll close by saying that I am Paul Graham's greatest fan -- I think he is one of the greatest intellectuals in the world today! And I agree with 99.44% of everything else that he has so wisely and eloquently said or written in the past!
And I love his essays, YCombinator, HN, etc., etc.!!!
However, I have to sharply, and I mean sharply disagree with this one essay...
You see, I will put this essay against one from antiquity, and that one is the 5th Labor Of Hercules:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/stables.html
>"Hercules went to King Augeas, and without telling anything about Eurystheus, said that he would clean out the stables in one day, if Augeas would give him a tenth of his fine cattle.
Augeas couldn't believe his ears, but promised. Hercules brought Augeas's son along to watch. First the hero tore a big opening in the wall of the cattle-yard where the stables were. Then he made another opening in the wall on the opposite side of the yard.
Next, he dug wide trenches to two rivers which flowed nearby. He turned the course of the rivers into the yard. The rivers rushed through the stables, flushing them out, and all the mess flowed out the hole in the wall on other side of the yard."
PDS: See, King Augeas was expecting that Hercules would clean up the stables the old-fashioned way -- by using his strength to clean them out manually.
King Augeas was expecting that Hercules work hard for him.
Hercules did work hard, but additionally, Hercules also worked smart -- by digging only what was necessary to direct the river or rivers -- and letting the flowing water, letting nature itself -- do all of the work!
Now compare this to MapReduce.
Compare this to Jeff Dean of Google, and all that he does.
Jeff Dean and MapReduce leverage computation power (think of them as the streams of water) -- to do all of the "Heavy Lifting".
They work hard -- but they also work smart.
They utilize an infrastructure (Hercules with the water from a river, Jeff Dean wtih the power from distributed computing/distributed queries/MapReduce, etc.) which when skillfully directed, at their hands, performs all of the hard work for them...
They work smart.
Now this being said, I'll close by saying that I am Paul Graham's greatest fan -- I think he is one of the greatest intellectuals in the world today! And I agree with 99.44% of everything else that he has so wisely and eloquently said or written in the past!
And I love his essays, YCombinator, HN, etc., etc.!!!
But we slightly disagree -- on this one! <g>
In a friendly way, of course! <g>