Alan Kay: Smalltalk is not about objects, it’s about messaging (1998)

Re:Alan Kay: Smalltalk is not about objects, it’s about mess... by dnautics on Saturday December 21, 2019 @05:44PM (#21853750)

Yes and no. Carl hewit will tell you that erlang's actor model is not pure (and to be sure a process doesn't have to be much of an actor - like Elixir's Task module). But I think that impurity is one of the strengths of the BEAM.

So I would qualify 'best' to meant "easiest system that 95% looks like actors that you can quickly get up and running and doing useful things and or play around with"

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Re:Alan Kay: Smalltalk is not about objects, it’s about mess... by anaphor on Saturday December 21, 2019 @07:11PM (#21854183)

E (http://erights.org/), Monte (https://www.monte-language.org/), and Pony (https://www.ponylang.io/) are probably the most faithful actor-model languages I know of.

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Re:Alan Kay: Smalltalk is not about objects, it’s about mess... by ProfHewitt on Saturday December 21, 2019 @08:11PM (#21854438)

Above are important contributions, but they don't provide an adequate foundation for Actor massive concurrency.

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Re:Alan Kay: Smalltalk is not about objects, it’s about mess... by dualogy on Sunday December 22, 2019 @01:41AM (#21855652)

Any others around today that do?

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Re:Alan Kay: Smalltalk is not about objects, it’s about mess... by dnautics on Sunday December 22, 2019 @12:10PM (#21858296)

In erlang based systems stateful network protocols and concurrent user stories are all modeled with actors and one million connections per node for websockets is a thing.

I deployed an actor-based system model to completely rearchitect and replace an inefficient stateless python system. There have been zero runtime or concurrency errors since I deployed (unfortunately sometimes the hardware the actors are modeling fail us) but patches to work around the hardware failures are simple.

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Re:Alan Kay: Smalltalk is not about objects, it’s about mess... by ProfHewitt on Sunday December 22, 2019 @10:07AM (#21857477)

The Actor Model has been used in many important large applications [Bernstein, Bykov, Geller, Kliot, and Thelin 2014; Bonér and Reisz 2017, Cesarini 2019] and has become the foundation for current computing.

Satisfactory implementation for Reusable Scalable Intelligent Systems with millions of Actor cores for quadrillions of Actor are under development, but not yet publicly available.

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