Rondam Ramblings: Yes, you can have exactly-once delivery
This post is ostensibly about an obscure technical issue in distributed systems, but it's really about human communications, and how disagreements that on the surface appear to be about technical issues can sometimes turn out to actually be disagreements about the meanings of words. I'm taking the time to write a fairly extensive post about this for two reasons. First, I'm hoping it will be helpful to provide a case-study about what appears on the surface to be a technical dispute that turns out to be a mere quibble over terminology. Learning to recognize such situations can help defuse tense situations. And second, this might provide some cover for someone early in their career who comes to the same conclusion I did about a certain emperor having no clothes.
I was reading Hacker News a few days ago and stumbled on a comment posted by /u/solatic in response to an article entitled "Falsehoods programmers believe about TCP". I quote that comment here in its entirety:
