Thanks Toast!
You have made the point exactly. The problem of dangling processes is made worse by the fact that Erlang is not strongly typed.
You have made the point exactly. The problem of dangling processes is made worse by the fact that Erlang is not strongly typed.
Especially objects that need to be pinned by ref counting.
My personal interpretation of the Actor model is a message passing system to model the real world.
In the real world I can shout out "make me a sandwich" and even if I perceive that there is a process that could potentially satisfy that request, I also work on the assumption that for any number of reasons... the channel of communication going away, misenterpretation, the agent or myself dying, the resources not being available or delays due to manufacturing may impede progress.
That is just the way the real world works.
Although Future/Promise can be built easily on top of Actor, they are optimistic at best - especially in diatributed cases; which, if my interpretation is correct is your reason for Actor in the first place.
Actor is powerful so in my opinion, future/promise and building ref-counts on top undermines the core of it.
Pat Helland, after numerous years of distributed transaction work completely did a 180 in the face of reality.
There is nothing wrong with Actor.
As far as strong typing, I personally believe that is a completely orthogonal conversation. I just cannot see the conflation.
Strongly typed to me means I send an argument to a function and it happens to match the signature.
Well, if I have a strongly typed function that takes two integers and somehow is supposed to return the sum. I guess it is helpful to know that as the user-agent (caller) of the function, but that knowledge only helps programmers, not computers.
Strong typing is definitely not a model of reality when dealing with humans as functions, and often humans are end-point "processes" (heh) of function calls.
Not that I am against strong typing in any way. I just believe the Actor model is cleaner without mixing things up.
Certainly agree Erlang is great but not the ultimate.
Well... my 2c and thanks to you, Alan, Joe, Hoare, Sussman, Gelernter et al. et al. for the inspirations over the years, and appreciate you plugging away at the models to this day.
Have a wonderful holiday.