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Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

ee380.stanford.edu

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Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#11

Post by discreteevent »

ngc248 wrote: post #8

The actor model is simply magnificent. Once i encountered the actor model, concurrency just clicked for me. Even writing concurrent programs in a non-actor context became simple and easy. It is that amazing.

Every so often when thinking about a system I find I need a default model to go back to. Like when a system seems to be complex or someone is claiming that it has some new property that makes it exceptional or whatever. It's probably possible to pick a few different models but I find the actor model usually covers it. e.g. "Well when you really look at it, it's just a bunch of actors sending messages to each other's addresses/mailboxes"

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#14

Post by gumby »

This is a real loss. I learned a lot from him, ironically more from late night trips to Chinatown than formally in the lab. He had a wide ranging intellect that did not diminish with age.

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#15

Post by smallstepforman »

Dang it, we lost 2 of the biggest champions of the Actor model, Carl and Joe a couple of years ago. Who is left to carry the torch to illuminate millions of developers who have no idea or have never heard of the Actor model? Sadly, we will see thousands or poorly thought out replacement models (eg. C++ futures, thread pools etc), which only offer a subset of Actor functionality instead of implementing the whole she-bang. E

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#16

Post by TowerTall »

ngc248 wrote: post #8

The actor model is simply magnificent. Once i encountered the actor model, concurrency just clicked for me. Even writing concurrent programs in a non-actor context became simple and easy. It is that amazing.

This is one of my favorite tech talks.

Hewitt, Meijer and Szyperski: The Actor Model (everything you wanted to know but are afraid to ask)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7erJ1DV_Tlo

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#17

Post by abecedarius »

Sad news. Some of the early papers on actors are listed at http://erights.org/history/actors.html (with a bunch of broken links, unfortunately, but they should be findable).

Another really stimulating paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3115052_The_Scienti... proposing that powerful problem-solvers could be organized like a model of the human scientific community.

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#19

Post by amalgamated_inc »

radiowave wrote: post #13
tempodox wrote: post #12

@dang, I move to show the black bar for this sad event. It has been almost a month, but it's the first mention on HN.

Seconded. I hadn't heard that he'd gone.

Yes please. Saw an interview with him and Joe Armstrong I believe. What a gentleman.

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#20

Post by dangets »

smallstepforman wrote: post #15

Dang it, we lost 2 of the biggest champions of the Actor model, Carl and Joe a couple of years ago. Who is left to carry the torch to illuminate millions of developers who have no idea or have never heard of the Actor model? Sadly, we will see thousands or poorly thought out replacement models (eg. C++ futures, thread pools etc), which only offer a subset of Actor functionality instead of implementing the whole she-b…

I wouldn't say that the actor model is going away. There are several new-ish projects built around it or retrofitting it in more common languages.

- Elixir (and Erlang) https://elixir-lang.org/

- Akka - JVM and .NET frameworks - https://akka.io/ https://getakka.net/

- Actix - Rust framework - https://actix.rs/docs/actix/getting-started

- MS Orleans - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/orleans/overview

- Pony - https://www.ponylang.io/

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