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As the creators of Erlang had stated, the similarity between Erlang's concurrency model and the Actor model is completely accidental.
by nesarkvechnep 5y ago
As the creators of Erlang had stated, the similarity between Erlang's concurrency model and the Actor model is completely accidental.
- jacquesm 5y agoBut in the same way that there are evolutionary tracks that lead to the same end result. The eye has evolved up to 40 times independently (see: https://www.nature.com/articles/eye2017226 https://www.nature.com/articles/eye2017226 ), which is all 'accidental' but for very good reasons: the advantages of having eyes are very large. Ditto for something like the actor model.
- dnautics 5y agothe motivations matter. I think Prof. Hewitt was looking for something that could defeat the church-turing hypothesis. The erlang creators cared about fault-tolerance. So other Actor systems out there have different design lineage which means different low-level design choices, and in many ways, they aren't quite the same in ways that are subtle, hard to see, but still quite important to the ergonomics of the developer or maintainer who is in the weeds.
- slver 5y agoThat doesn’t matter much.