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I've played with this a bit, professionally and personally (Scala/Akka specifically). The way it makes you think about your model and the boundaries it introdu
by Latty 9y ago
I've played with this a bit, professionally and personally (Scala/Akka specifically).
The way it makes you think about your model and the boundaries it introduces seem good. I really love the way it forces you to model the communication between parts of your code as a data structure - it feels like a much less costly version of the "everything as a micro-service" dream.
Scala seems like the ideal language for it - you need really simple, powerful data types for it to feel good, otherwise those messages become painful to make or get overloaded in bad ways.
Akka was still struggling with type loss in the system the last time I used it, which really felt like a pain, and where I feel it adds the boundary that makes it harder to understand.
- the_af 9y ago> Akka was still struggling with type loss in the system the last time I used it, which really felt like a pain, and where I feel it adds the boundary that makes it harder to understand. I don't know if this is what you are referring to, but: I don't understand the mix of Akka actors and Scala. Scala is a statically typed language -- in fact, that's the whole point of it -- and using Akka actors feels a bit like programming in Smalltalk. So you turn a statically typed language into a dynamically typed language with message passing. Honest question: why would you use Scala for that? Back when I took Coursera's "Reactive Programming in Scala" course, some years ago, I asked Ronald Kuhn & Martin Odersky precisely this question, and they didn't have a convincing answer. Kuhn's answer was "good point, we're also considering Typed Actors". It's my impression Scala never did go with Typed Actors (I might be mistaken; I certainly don't use them), so I wonder what's their current answer to this question.
- Latty 9y agoYes, this is precisely the problem I had - Scala is great, Akka's model seems good, but the mix feels like you loose something along the way. The typed actors stuff does exist, but it's experimental, and the last time I checked they had just thrown away the old version and were working on a new implementation. It seems like it would be better, but it's clearly not done yet.
- nickpsecurity 9y agoThose of you discussing Scala Actors might like the details in this paper on that I coincidentally submitted to Lobste.rs this morning: https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/151999/files/EPFL_TH4874.pdf https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/151999/files/EPFL_TH4874....