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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, j

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 ;)

davidw 17y ago
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.
runT1ME 17y ago
Well done sir troll, well done...
Zev 17y ago
Might I suggest that you look into a language with Actors before saying that Actors are difficult to figure out? Personally, I'm a huge fan of Io[1], which uses Actors extensively. Io has an incredibly minimal syntax that you (or any smart 17 year old) should be able to pick up in under a weekend - less time, if you/they have experience with a language that uses prototypical inheritance (such as JavaScript). This is pretty big, since the language doesn't impose itself or get in the way of any of the concepts that you're working with, to potentially confuse you. With Io, if you've cloned an object, you have an actor that can perform asynchronous actions for you. Its as simple as: foo := self @bar // asynchronous actor that returns a Future. [1] http://iolanguage.com/ http://iolanguage.com/
richcollins 17y ago
See http://iolanguage.com/ http://iolanguage.com/ for a magical balance of simplicity and expressiveness
derefr 17y ago
The most famous actor-model language, Erlang, was designed primarily for phone networks. How would you create a system of millions of nodes with fault-tolerant, hot-swappable, gradually-updatable code without actors? (Keeping in mind that REST is an example of the actor model.)

davidw 17y ago

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.

runT1ME 17y ago

Well done sir troll, well done...

Zev 17y ago

Might I suggest that you look into a language with Actors before saying that Actors are difficult to figure out? Personally, I'm a huge fan of Io[1], which uses Actors extensively. Io has an incredibly minimal syntax that you (or any smart 17 year old) should be able to pick up in under a weekend - less time, if you/they have experience with a language that uses prototypical inheritance (such as JavaScript). This is pretty big, since the language doesn't impose itself or get in the way of any of the concepts that you're working with, to potentially confuse you. With Io, if you've cloned an object, you have an actor that can perform asynchronous actions for you. Its as simple as: foo := self @bar // asynchronous actor that returns a Future. [1] http://iolanguage.com/ http://iolanguage.com/

richcollins 17y ago

See http://iolanguage.com/ http://iolanguage.com/ for a magical balance of simplicity and expressiveness

derefr 17y ago

The most famous actor-model language, Erlang, was designed primarily for phone networks. How would you create a system of millions of nodes with fault-tolerant, hot-swappable, gradually-updatable code without actors? (Keeping in mind that REST is an example of the actor model.)