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Hah, of course I meant the "techie" colloquial of Actor, not the thepsian one. But I suppose that my comment is true in both senses. :) Thanks for clarifying.
by gmfawcett 7y ago
Hah, of course I meant the "techie" colloquial of Actor, not the thepsian one. But I suppose that my comment is true in both senses. :)
Thanks for clarifying. I'm not familiar with your theory, but at least I understand why you raised the point -- some Erlang programs are needlessly complicated due to the language's (colloquial!) actor semantics.
- ProfHewitt 7y agoYou are very welcome gmfawcett! What Erlang programs have you found to be needlessly complicated?
- dnautics 7y ago> Some Erlang programs are needlessly complicated due to the language's (colloquial!) actor semantics. Maybe you're referring to junior-to-BEAM programmers reaching to prove they can use gen_servers everywhere? There are also obscure corners of OTP that are a bit of a mess, but I'd say that's because it's inherited a lot of C-style folkways and doesn't have hierarchical module aliasing in the same way that say Elixir has. And there's a substantial amount of using modules-like-factories that got picked up in certain corners of the ecosystem, probably from Java habits, but I don't see that as much in Elixir, which suggests that it's not the actor semantics so much as, just outdated programming trends that have accumulated in the erlang ecosystem by virtue of it being older, and a "less popular" language that other people try to shove their round pegs into (arguably elixir is the latest iteration of that but they seem to have made some really good choices, at least in my opinion).