Turing Award Winner On Thinking Clearly, Paxos vs Raft, Working With Dijkstra | Leslie Lamport

This podcast explores the career and insights of Leslie Lamport, a Turing Award winner known for his contributions to distributed systems. Lamport recounts the origins and impact of his key works, including the Bakery Algorithm, Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in Distributed Systems, the Byzantine Generals Problem, and Paxos. He details his collaborations with Edsger Dijkstra, his motivations for creating LaTeX, and his emphasis on writing and rigorous proof for computer system design. Lamport reflects on the importance of abstraction, his move from mathematics to computer science, and his evolving understanding of concurrency, highlighting the role of state machines. He also shares anecdotes about the initial rejection of Paxos and the story behind the naming of the Byzantine Generals Problem.