Fundamental principles often just formally state the obvious.
People who want CAP to be profound and useful are missing the point - it just tells you some things that you might want to try to achieve are provably impossible. Just like Newton’s first law tells you things can’t accelerate without a force (duh) and the first law of thermodynamics tells you you can’t get energy out of a perpetual motion machine (duh) and the pigeonhole principle tells you if you put n things in less than n groups, at least one group has more than one thing in it (duh); CAP tells you you can’t build a distributed, partitionable data system that is 100% consistent and 100% available (duh).
It’s not that deep or profound but it is proven and it eliminates a whole class of ideas from meriting further thought because they’re demonstrably impossible. That lets us get on with making the most of what is possible.
First law (inertia) basically states that in the absence of a force, no acceleration can happen (sometimes stated as ‘an object in motion will remain in motion, an object at rest will remain at rest’).
Second law gets more specific, and clarifies that the size of the acceleration is proportional to the size of the force.
People who want CAP to be profound and useful are missing the point - it just tells you some things that you might want to try to achieve are provably impossible. Just like Newton’s first law tells you things can’t accelerate without a force (duh) and the first law of thermodynamics tells you you can’t get energy out of a perpetual motion machine (duh) and the pigeonhole principle tells you if you put n things in less than n groups, at least one group has more than one thing in it (duh); CAP tells you you can’t build a distributed, partitionable data system that is 100% consistent and 100% available (duh).
It’s not that deep or profound but it is proven and it eliminates a whole class of ideas from meriting further thought because they’re demonstrably impossible. That lets us get on with making the most of what is possible.