i especially like the QA section explaining "why do it if Hickey said actors are bad" (intentional strawman there): > The points he makes are of course very go

i especially like the QA section explaining "why do it if Hickey said actors are bad" (intentional strawman there): > The points he makes are of course very good. For example, when no state is shared between processes there is some communication overhead, but this isolation is also an advantage under a lot of circumstances. He also mentions here that building for the distributed case (a.k.a processes and message passing) is more complex and not always necessary, so he decided to optimise for the non-distributed case and add distribution to the parts of the system that need it. Rich Hickey calls Erlang "quite impressive", so my interpretation of these writings is that they are more about exposing the rationale behind the decisions and the trade-offs he made when designing Clojure (on the JVM), than about disregarding the actor model. That would be my understanding as well. Clojure and Erlang are ideologically quite close, just made with slightly different purposes. Erlang - to be distributed from the ground up. Clojure - to handle mutability on somewhat lower level and be on JVM, where mutability is the norm.