4 ms·

I’m the pessimistic opposite here; I’m a little shocked to see this largely failed idea be dragged back out of the history books again, a good decade-plus after

I’m the pessimistic opposite here; I’m a little shocked to see this largely failed idea be dragged back out of the history books again, a good decade-plus after the last major failed attempt. We’ve gone through this so many times, and — outside the very specialized Erlang — the result is always the same. It doesn’t work. OO Actors are a terrible concurrency model, and an even worse networking, protocol definition, and serialization model.

johnnycerberus 5y ago
Erlang nailed the actor model.
- ProfHewitt 5y ago
  Erlang incorporated some of the ideas of the Actor Abstraction but missed a few things. See See article and video here: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3603021 https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3603021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJP1VL7shiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJP1VL7shiI
halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
I've used Akka extensively and beg to differ. It's such a clean departure from traditional concurrent programming and the "let it fail" mentality around it is real. The distributed features work as intended to great effect with only certain edge cases (split brain for example) that need to have care but at that point in scale, you're already leveraging all the best parts.
- rektide 5y ago
  I'm wearing an Akka shirt right now! Agreed. ;) Not my realm, but a friend who was way into SDN systems told me some about how Akka powers a vast vast amount of that work (OpenDaylight), extremely well; I could use a refresher on that, it was such a great story to hear! Another example, Microsoft has done fantastically with Orleans[1]. I'd like to propose an actually dead idea: calling ideas dead. That we fail with tech ideas & abstractions is 99.%%% of the time not really reflective of the idea itself. There's survivorship bias- well, I think we need a term for the opposite: didn't work bias. A lot of technologies are dogged by image problems from less than successful pasts. Too often we pop culturally & en-masse accept that specific failures imply general unsuitability, and become fixed, hostile, & negative towards ideas. We should label this phenomenon & understand it better. "Didn't Work Bias" doesn't quite feel like the best fit or reciprocal to Survivorship Bias but it's a start at capturing these prevalent anti-idea sentimentalities. [1] https://dotnet.github.io/orleans/ https://dotnet.github.io/orleans/

johnnycerberus 5y ago

Erlang nailed the actor model.

ProfHewitt 5y ago
Erlang incorporated some of the ideas of the Actor Abstraction but missed a few things. See See article and video here: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3603021 https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3603021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJP1VL7shiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJP1VL7shiI

halfmatthalfcat 5y ago

I've used Akka extensively and beg to differ. It's such a clean departure from traditional concurrent programming and the "let it fail" mentality around it is real. The distributed features work as intended to great effect with only certain edge cases (split brain for example) that need to have care but at that point in scale, you're already leveraging all the best parts.

rektide 5y ago
I'm wearing an Akka shirt right now! Agreed. ;) Not my realm, but a friend who was way into SDN systems told me some about how Akka powers a vast vast amount of that work (OpenDaylight), extremely well; I could use a refresher on that, it was such a great story to hear! Another example, Microsoft has done fantastically with Orleans[1]. I'd like to propose an actually dead idea: calling ideas dead. That we fail with tech ideas & abstractions is 99.%%% of the time not really reflective of the idea itself. There's survivorship bias- well, I think we need a term for the opposite: didn't work bias. A lot of technologies are dogged by image problems from less than successful pasts. Too often we pop culturally & en-masse accept that specific failures imply general unsuitability, and become fixed, hostile, & negative towards ideas. We should label this phenomenon & understand it better. "Didn't Work Bias" doesn't quite feel like the best fit or reciprocal to Survivorship Bias but it's a start at capturing these prevalent anti-idea sentimentalities. [1] https://dotnet.github.io/orleans/ https://dotnet.github.io/orleans/