Armstrong's death was one of the few that I was sort of hit by, despite not knowing him personally. I've watched so many of his talks, read as much as I could f

Armstrong's death was one of the few that I was sort of hit by, despite not knowing him personally. I've watched so many of his talks, read as much as I could from him, and I've generally found him to be quite an inspiration and seemingly a great guy. More on the point of the article, it's sort of fun to think about the fact that "OO Sucks" is sort of ironic given Alan Kay's initial description of OO was closer to actors than what we think of OO today (he acknowledges this at a later time). As Kay puts it: I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is "messaging" [..] The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be. [0][1] This is very much in the spirit of Armstrong's quote in the article: > Since functions and data structures are completely different types of animal it is fundamentally incorrect to lock them up in the same cage. Armstrong talked a lot about how shared mutable state was wrong on a fundamental level - it "breaks reality(/causality)" and that sort of thing. Again, sort of fun to think about the fact that the core ideas with actors seemed to have an origin in an early focus on asynchronous 'cell'-like computers, like the JOHNNIAC in 1953[2], even though the foundation of the model wasn't named or formalized until the 70s. "Its designers began with the hope of stretching the mean free time between failures and increasing the overall reliability by a factor of ten". Systems like JOHNIAC where IAS machines - asynchronous CPUs. These worked through causality, not synchronization. In Armstrong's thesis[3] 'Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors' he references papers like [4] 'Why do computers stop and what can be done about it? Technical Report 85.7, Tandem Computers, 1985.', which talks again about isolated processes and transactions as a foundation to reliable computing - over 30 years later. This whole area is so deeply fascinating with a century of repeating, refining ideas, and I found that just by reading what I could from Armstrong I had a sort of rough guide through this area. There are these cool ties to early ideas about AI, and I guess a lot of people though that languages should model life, and later Kay talks about this as well, and funny enough AWS now has "cell based architecture" - their discipline built around isolation and fault tolerance. A lot of this is sort of just random connections from jumping from paper to paper - but I just found it all really cool. Reading this thread, it almost seems like people don't know who Joe Armstrong is? Or at least they've missed a lot of the point. This isn't an "X vs Y" from some rando, he built Erlang. It's also not about functional programming. I highly recommend reading what he has to say, and watching his talks. [0] http://wiki.c2.com/?AlanKayOnMessaging http://wiki.c2.com/?AlanKayOnMessaging [1] https://computinged.wordpress.com/2010/09/11/moti-asks-objects-never-well-hardly-ever/ https://computinged.wordpress.com/2010/09/11/moti-asks-objec... [2] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2005/RM5654.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand... [3] https://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/coursework/cosc461/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf https://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/coursework/cosc461/armstrong_thes... [4] https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf