The 84-year-old Leslie Lamport is a legend. A Microsoft web page (where he once worked as a research scientist) notes that Lamport began “dabbling” in computers in the 1950s — at a time when that meant “he and a friend used to scrounge around, looking for discarded vacuum tubes to build a digital circuit.” Sixty years later, he’d received a Turing Award for “fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems.” After decades of research, Lamport even releas...