3 ms·

The first Actor languages were inspired by Smalltalk-72 and make a lot more sense if you are familiar with -72 and less for those who only know Smalltalk-80.

• ProfHewitt 5y ago
  Excellent video by Dan Ingalls on the Xerox early history of Smalltalk. In November 1972, Alan Kay gave an inspiring seminar at MIT on Smalltalk-72. There were ongoing discussions during the weeks after the lecture about the following: Dennis and van Horn capabilities Petri nets Smalltalk-72 Simula, which was strangely very different from Smalltalk-72 the Internet etc.) After extensive discussion about limitations of previous efforts, we realized that there is a single abstraction that provided the foundation for all of computation which it was decided to name the "Actors Abstraction". The Actors Paradigm covers all of digital computation and consequently is more powerful than Church/Turing Paradigm. Although the use of bitmap displays with Smalltak-72 was very impressive, Smalltalk-72 left a great deal to be desired as a programming language. Later Smalltalk designs were completely different because they adopted the Simula class hierarchy instead of the byte stream interpreter of Smalltalk72 Limitations of Smalltalk72 reinforced the decision to not define the fundamental abstraction of computation using a programming language. Instead computation should be defined axiomatically in terms of fundamental concepts including Actors Computational Events Partial order on computational events Regions of mutual exclusion Event induction as the foundation for proving properties of Actors Systems See the following on how to axiomatically define computation using the Actors Abstraction: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3418003 https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3418003 https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3459566 https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3459566 Also, see the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJP1VL7shiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJP1VL7shiI