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Actor Thinking

Stefan Tilkov,

Kresten Krab Thorup:

For many years, I have been searching for what I call the "holy grail of concurrent programming." I have been looking for a set of abstractions as powerful as classes and objects which describes activities and their coordination. Just as was the case for the medieval quest for the holy grail, I am not alone. Many other researchers are searching for this. I remember that at the time when I started doing my Ph.D. in 1996, I was talking to Doug Lea about this subject; and he urged me to continue this line of thought. My thesis subject ended up going down another path, but the issue has persisted at the back of my mind, ready to jump up whenever I experienced new evidence that might guide me.

For the last couple of years I have been pursuing these issues more persistently; as chief editor of the JAOO and QCon conferences I have invited speakers that have something related to this on their hearts and mind, and the last six months - since working more intensively with the Erlang programming language - they have started to grow into a more consistent picture.

So here is a little essay and some ramblings on some of the things I have found out so far.

Excellent stuff.

On January 19, 2010 7:15 PM, Jörg Plewe said:

D’accord. I esp. liked the part that knowing about the machines basic mechanics hinders in thinking of highly abstract concepts in that highly abstract way. Whenever I see an URL I think of how much CPU cycles are wasted in parsing such a beast alone instead of just abstracting it as a resource tag as which it is used nowadays.

:)