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The actor model is prized in the talk. Yet actor model is not functional. The problem is the message queue of each actor. It is an imperative storage and one c

The actor model is prized in the talk. Yet actor model is not functional. The problem is the message queue of each actor. It is an imperative storage and one can get all nasty problems of imperative code from apparently functional code patterns.

msangi 8y ago
What would a functional approach be?
- yoava 8y ago
  Function composition
- fpoling 8y ago
  It depends on what is the goal. To take advantage of multicore for computations one can use explicitly parallel functional algorithms. To improve response under load one can do load balancing within application and schedule at the very top (shell level) several independent functional pipelines.
yoava 8y ago
Actor model is even worse, you have no gerentee of a response or error status
shrimpx 8y ago
There aren't that many ways you can mess up a message queue.
ramchip 8y ago
You can build every actor like a miniature program, with its own imperative shell and functional core. In Erlang it's common to have various message handlers that are very imperative, but defer all complicated logic to pure functions that take part of the actor state and return a transformed state.
- mercer 8y ago
  I've been doing more and more Elixir work, and one of the most important lessons I keep learning is to keep my 'actors' as simple as possible and put the complicated stuff in my 'bags of functions'. I generally try to treat my code as two completely separate layers: the code that does stuff, and the code that orchestrates/isolates all of it. What I find fascinating is that, at least for me, using GenServers/Agents/Tasks has made this distinction much more obvious than it has been in other languages. I've built horrifying systems that muddled things together, only to realize quite far in how much of a mess I made, but with my Elixir projects I usually realize what I've done pretty quickly, and I end up course-correcting earlier on.

msangi 8y ago

What would a functional approach be?

yoava 8y ago
Function composition
fpoling 8y ago
It depends on what is the goal. To take advantage of multicore for computations one can use explicitly parallel functional algorithms. To improve response under load one can do load balancing within application and schedule at the very top (shell level) several independent functional pipelines.

yoava 8y ago

Actor model is even worse, you have no gerentee of a response or error status

shrimpx 8y ago

There aren't that many ways you can mess up a message queue.

ramchip 8y ago

You can build every actor like a miniature program, with its own imperative shell and functional core. In Erlang it's common to have various message handlers that are very imperative, but defer all complicated logic to pure functions that take part of the actor state and return a transformed state.

mercer 8y ago
I've been doing more and more Elixir work, and one of the most important lessons I keep learning is to keep my 'actors' as simple as possible and put the complicated stuff in my 'bags of functions'. I generally try to treat my code as two completely separate layers: the code that does stuff, and the code that orchestrates/isolates all of it. What I find fascinating is that, at least for me, using GenServers/Agents/Tasks has made this distinction much more obvious than it has been in other languages. I've built horrifying systems that muddled things together, only to realize quite far in how much of a mess I made, but with my Elixir projects I usually realize what I've done pretty quickly, and I end up course-correcting earlier on.