On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 12:44 PM, Tristan Slominski < [email protected]> wrote:
> popular implementations (like Akka, for example) give up things such as > Object Capability for nothing.. it's depressing. > Indeed. Though, frameworks shouldn't rail too much against their hosts. > > I still prefer to model them as in every message is delivered. It wasn't I > who challenged this original guaranteed-delivery condition but Carl Hewitt > himself. > It is guaranteed in the original formalism, and even Hewitt can't change that. But you can model loss of messages (e.g. by explicitly modeling a lossy network). > You've described composing actors into actor configurations :D, from the > outside world, your island looks like a single actor. > I did not specify that there is only one bridge, nor that you finish processing a message from a bridge before we start processing another next. If you model the island as a single actor, you would fail to represent many of the non-deterministic interactions possible in the 'island as a set' of actors. > I don't think we have created enough tooling or understanding to fully > grok the consequences of the actor model yet. Where's our math for emergent > properties and swarm dynamics of actor systems? [..] Where is our reasoning > about symbiotic autopoietic and allopoietic systems? This is, in my view, > where the actor systems will shine I cannot fathom your optimism. What we can say of a model is often specific to how we implemented it, the main exceptions being compositional properties (which are trivially a superset of invariants). Ad-hoc reasoning easily grows intractable and ambiguous to the extent the number of possibilities increases or depends on deep implementation details. And actors model seems to go out of its way to make reasoning difficult - pervasive state, pervasive non-determinism, negligible ability to make consistent observations or decisions involving the states of two or more actors. I think any goal to lower those comprehension barriers will lead to development of a new models. Of course, they might first resolve as frameworks or design patterns that get used pervasively (~ global transformation done by hand, ugh). Before RDP, there were reactive design patterns I had developed in the actors model while pursuing greater consistency and resilience. Regards, Dave
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