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Comment by 0xFFC | Hacker News Reader

What is the deal with "akka" ? Is that some kind of abbreviation?

From a FAQ in the Akka docs [0]:

Where does the name Akka come from?

It is the name of a beautiful Swedish mountain up in the northern part of Sweden called Laponia. The mountain is also sometimes called 'The Queen of Laponia'.

Akka is also the name of a goddess in the Sámi (the native Swedish population) mythology. She is the goddess that stands for all the beauty and good in the world. The mountain can be seen as the symbol of this goddess.

Also, the name AKKA is the a palindrome of letters A and K as in Actor Kernel.

Akka is also:

    the name of the goose that Nils traveled across Sweden on in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf.
    the Finnish word for 'nasty elderly woman' and the word for 'elder sister' in the Indian languages Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Marathi.
    a font
    a town in Morocco
    a near-earth asteroid*

[0] http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.4.4/additional/faq.html

Akka is an open-source toolkit and runtime simplifying the construction of concurrent and distributed applications on the JVM. Akka supports multiple programming models for concurrency, but it emphasizes actor-based concurrency, with inspiration drawn from Erlang.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akka_(toolkit)
This is a .Net port of Akka.

The original Akka library is JVM implementation of the actor model, see http://akka.io/
Akka.NET is the .NET port of that fantastic project.

I think Gul Agha invented/popularized the actor paradigm when at MIT, because he came to UIllinois in 1988 or 1989 or so and gave a talk on it that I attended. Akka sounds like Agha so I bet there's some play on words in there, with the Scandinavian mountains and other explanations afterthoughts.

I think it is a Scandinavian mountain.

In Finnish "akka" is derogatory term for a woman. Closes translation would be "bitch".

The team is Swedish.

But, Akka's own FAQ mentions the Finnish meaning (among others), too.

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