4 ms·

I'm always curious why the Actor concept isn't more widely used. Many platforms / languages have some form of it.

by keithnz 8y ago

jacquesm 8y ago
I have no idea either, though the simplicity may be off-putting and might make people feel stupid for making it so overly complex. It seems like a near perfect fit for the web.
- jimbokun 8y ago
  This is why WhatsApp managed a $19B exit with only 50 engineers, while so few others have managed it.
  - therealdrag0 8y ago
    Apps like WhatsApp/Insta have relatively small feature-sets. I doubt you can pin their success on their tech-stack. It's more like they aggressively avoided feature creep.
cestith 8y ago
I'm equally curious about flow-based programming. Treating things as filters has worked well for the Unix command line. There's no reason we can't have processes do sort, filter, merge, lookup, and such in well-defined ways and chain them together as needed for many kinds of applications. Although "network" and "port" mean something particular within FBP it doesn't at all mean the processes can't be on different machines and talking via TCP/IP.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  There is an interesting equivalence between pure functional programming flow based programming and the actor model. There is a lot of fancy theory to underpin this equivalence, the essence is that all of them revolve around (side effect free) transformation.
  - scruple 8y ago
    I don't know Erlang and I'm only a couple of months in to learning Elixir in my (limited) free time. Grated, it's not purely functional, but... I've been reflecting on this exact equivalence, as you put it, and am happy to hear that my inclination about the Actor model isn't unfounded.
- NicoJuicy 8y ago
  Ugh, I'm trying to create something like this. The nodes are fine and easy, but the orchestration / flow implementation is getting me stuck for > 1 month... :(

4 ms·

I'm always curious why the Actor concept isn't more widely used. Many platforms / languages have some form of it.

by keithnz 8y ago

I'm always curious why the Actor concept isn't more widely used. Many platforms / languages have some form of it.

jacquesm 8y ago
I have no idea either, though the simplicity may be off-putting and might make people feel stupid for making it so overly complex. It seems like a near perfect fit for the web.
- jimbokun 8y ago
  This is why WhatsApp managed a $19B exit with only 50 engineers, while so few others have managed it.
  - therealdrag0 8y ago
    Apps like WhatsApp/Insta have relatively small feature-sets. I doubt you can pin their success on their tech-stack. It's more like they aggressively avoided feature creep.
cestith 8y ago
I'm equally curious about flow-based programming. Treating things as filters has worked well for the Unix command line. There's no reason we can't have processes do sort, filter, merge, lookup, and such in well-defined ways and chain them together as needed for many kinds of applications. Although "network" and "port" mean something particular within FBP it doesn't at all mean the processes can't be on different machines and talking via TCP/IP.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  There is an interesting equivalence between pure functional programming flow based programming and the actor model. There is a lot of fancy theory to underpin this equivalence, the essence is that all of them revolve around (side effect free) transformation.
  - scruple 8y ago
    I don't know Erlang and I'm only a couple of months in to learning Elixir in my (limited) free time. Grated, it's not purely functional, but... I've been reflecting on this exact equivalence, as you put it, and am happy to hear that my inclination about the Actor model isn't unfounded.
- NicoJuicy 8y ago
  Ugh, I'm trying to create something like this. The nodes are fine and easy, but the orchestration / flow implementation is getting me stuck for > 1 month... :(