Cache Invalidation

July 28th, 2010
programming, tech
A well known aphorism attributed to Phil Karlton is:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

I realized yesterday that this is really only one hard problem: much of the reason that naming things is hard is that changing names is hard, so you'd better name something right the first time. Why is it hard to rename things? Poor cache invalidation.

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