[PRL] random flame: actors versus OO

[David Herman]

That's nice to hear, because it means my gut feelings haven't been 
totally off track.

This reminds me: the other day Felix and I were wondering about the 
connection between actors and the history of Scheme. I've heard that 
the early development of Scheme had something to do with people playing 
with actor semantics. Aside from the general fact that Scheme is a good 
for writing interpreters and playing with language ideas, I'm not 
really seeing any particular relation with actors. In fact, FWICT, 
there's nothing directly addressing concurrency in the core language at 
all. What's the historical connection?

Dave

On Tuesday, February 17, 2004, at 03:48 PM, William D Clinger wrote:

> 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
>
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