[PRL] random flame: actors versus OO

[Matthias Felleisen]

Perhaps it's really fair to say that some people had actor-oriented 
programming in mind and that some others had class-based OO programming 
in mind and yet a few more thought of plain OO programming. -- Matthias


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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