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Comment by mercer | Hacker News Reader

Are you secretly promoting Elixir/Erlang, or am I misreading what you mean with 'agents' in this case?

Down that path, but I'm just not sure Erlang is enough. I might be a bit infected by the promise of Telescript[1] or a paper[2]. RPC over HTTP (in one or more of its forms) won over mobile code, but I think the concept of software agents actually has a bigger win in the building of complex systems that can be reasoned about in the small as well as the large. I also think that the ability to replace software agents in a large system would be easier than refactoring / replacing objects.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_langua...

2) http://robotics.stanford.edu/~shoham/www%20papers/AgentOrien... from http://robotics.stanford.edu/~shoham/

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you'd like to see beyond Erlang. I'm new to Elixir/Erlang, so very curious to see it in a broader perspective.

I love Erlang and their attitude about keeping systems running. Plus, the syntax gets a bad rap when its just different. Sadly, the process and state models are different from what really interests me in agents.

Which part interests you about agents?

I'm having a hard time writing up a complete answer, and will probably someday write an actual article, but I think the key for me is loose coupling of functionality and mobile code being a very interesting way to scale up a server farm. The whole thought of combining agents and tuple spaces into a system seems a lot closer to true reuse in software than objects has been. I think an agent programming language, a good speech act based communication language instead of the typical API, decent data types, and tuple spaces would make for a heck of a nice programming environment. I've had a hobby project for a long time to bring those elements together but I am still in the learning phase.

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