The assertion at the time was that only a few people understood it well enough to make a correct implementation, the others were full of bugs.

The problem we have with Lamport is that he’s very good at talking to computers but not so good at talking to humans. I think the world would be a better place today if someone had forced him to learn to speak human.

He did a presentation at MS just after he won the Turing Award. He prefaces it with how important writing is to thinking, and how you don’t really know what you think until you write it down. Those are the words and thinking of an introvert. Writing is still the shallow end of understanding. The deep end is teaching. If you understand something and you teach it to others, then you have proven that you understand it, and caused that understanding not to be lost to posterity. If you only write about it, it might work as instructional material, or it may require some very clever people who can teach themselves using your words. But they may also get it wrong, and not have you for feedback.

The latter is where seem to be with Leslie’s works. The consensus is that few people actually understand what he’s talking about well enough to implement it correctly.

I had a coworker once who was shocked to learn I read the ACM SIGPLAN proceedings. “You can read those??” I knew what he meant and yeah, a lot of those were very unapproachable and I understood two thirds of them and only half of each of the rest. Before I committed to using Raft I gave Lamport’s paper a try. It was a slog and he doesn’t sell the why of each part. He’s just giving you a very, very long recipe without the mental models necessary to reproduce it robustly.