Comment by jumploops

If I receive multiple hamburgers via DoorDash, but only eat one, it’s not “exactly-once delivery.”

The extra step where I give my neighbor(s), compost, or otherwise discard the N+1 hamburgers is a processing step.

My house can only hold so many hamburgers, and I can only process so many after eating my lucky chosen one.

This is what we (distributed systems thinkers) refer to when we say “delivery” — anything after the DoorDash step is up to us, the consumer, to process.

Yes, this definition is confusing to new programmers, because it makes it hard to reason about everyday systems, but it’s this exact type of definition that we need so that we can build the proper abstractions, as the author has done in his post, to make our applications behave the way we want.