[PRL] random flame: actors versus OO

William D Clinger will at ccs.neu.edu
Tue Feb 17 15:48:32 EST 2004


I ran across this gem while browsing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H conducting
a literature search.  Unlike most flames you'll find on the web,
this one is entirely true.

    Actors are the real thing of which object-oriented programming
    is the caricature. Actors are what Alan Kay had in mind but
    couldn't initially achieve when inventing the Object Oriented
    paradigm. When people say that OOP is based on an "intuitive"
    modelling of the world as objects in interaction, the intuition
    they invoke is the Actor model, but their actual OO model is a
    less-expressive version where only one object is active at a
    time, with a linear flow of control: Objects are crippled actors
    deprived of independent activity. Retrofitting concurrency in an
    existing Object-Oriented system can help express the Actor
    paradigm, but it requires more than the superficial addition of
    threads to unleash the real thing.

                                -- Faré
                                   (François-René Rideau)
                                   http://cliki.tunes.org/Actor

Will



More information about the PRL mailing list