

Why has the actor model not succeeded? (1997) - b-man
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_97/journal/vol2/pjm2/

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BigZaphod
Perhaps this is simplistic, but I believe it has succeeded in the form of web
APIs/REST/etc.

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mcav
NB: This was from 1997.

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marshallp
"""The actor model has no direct notion of inheritance or hierarchy, which
means it is time consuming and confusing to program actors with trends of
common behaviour."""

Mozart/oz allows you to easily implement actors which also have OO
inheritance.

Generally, many superior programming paradigms (logic, constraint, functional,
concurrent) have been ignored by the computing industry which has probably
cost it billions of dollars in lost productivity.

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andreyf
Billions? I think you're underestimating by several orders of magnitude.

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dons
Seems reasonable. Null pointers are rumored to have cost billions in waste and
failures. And they're trivial to fix with a little bit of static typing.

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chancho
Not sure I would call it "trivial." You just trade your segfault (or
NullPointerException) for a pattern match error.

Although that little bit of static typing would probably have dealt with the
vast majority of expensive null-pointer bugs.

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camccann
Not if you enable compiler errors for inexhaustive matches. Are there any
compilers for mainstream languages that can flag all possible segfault/NPE
locations as errors?

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wlievens
That's probably an intractable problem.

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forkandwait
I am one of the people who has not bothered to learn about the "actor model"
and thus perhaps lost billions... Why? Because it smells of needless
complexity, just like XML, Java, Haskell, and everything Microsoft touches.

I think for a technology (or at least a language) to go viral it needs either
(1) lots and lots of money (Java for PR, VBA because of the $$$ MS ecology) or
(2) a fairly genius level combination of power and simplicity (C, and why
Tcl/Tk won't quite die...).

The actor model, functional programming, blah blah blah, have neither enough
money behind them to make them happen, nor the magic balance of simplicity and
expressiveness such that that a smart 17 year old can spend a weekend learning
them and then begin writing apps that had been impossible before said language
(lua, for example).

So ... keep trying ;)

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davidw
As someone who has learned a bit about the actor model, I think it actually
simplifies one's life a great deal, in terms of writing concurrent programs.

