"The [Maelstrom property] has intrinsic stability, but it fails the programmer comprehension test..." #readingToday

The Maelstrom property, (named after a whirlpool at the confluence of two rivers in Northern Norway), was implicit in the way that CFEngine worked, but added the idea of using additional pre- conditions to a convergent operator. This meant that a given operator would have to wait for a certain observation to become a 'fact', before proceeding to converge to a fixed point. If the condition were not already true, it would do nothing. It is the standard approach to orchestrating convergent operations in CFEngine today, but it remains controversial amongst traditionalist imperative programmers. The process has intrinsic stability, but it fails the programmer comprehension test for those who need to see an explicit step by step flowchart.

The Search doe Certainty, Mark Burgess, 2013