He's certainly on to something. As he pointed out, it's been around since about '73, and many people are happy with the design of such systems. Amazon even has

He's certainly on to something. As he pointed out, it's been around since about '73, and many people are happy with the design of such systems. Amazon even has an actual for-real implementation of one (see Simple Workflow), he should probably try it out before rolling his own. It really is an elegant way to do things from what I can tell. It forces you to keep your state in one, carefully managed place (hairball), rather than sprinkled around god-knows where, being poked and prodded by god knows what.... IMHO, There should be more talk about the design of actor based systems than the glut of OO yammering we are all exposed to.