Live data from Hacker News

Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

ee380.stanford.edu

1–10 of 35 posts

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#4
This is sad news, he invented not only the actor model, but also planner and did a lot of groundwork for deductive and parallel systems.

One of the more obscure things he pursued as a result of his early actor model work was unbounded nondeterminism as a potential source for hyper-computation.[1]

I'll always remember fondly that he pointed me to some papers via twitter when I asked him some questions about unbounded nondeterminism as an undergrad.

[1]: https://programme.hypotheses.org/files/2019/06/cardone_dayli...

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#5
post #2

If I am not mistaken, he is the researcher behind the actor model. He was also active on HN, I remember.

actor model who was the reason behind the scheme lisp dialect, and contextually, underlying the arc language which runs this website

ps: j-pb above mentions planner, also linked to the logic programming world. damn

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#6
post #4

This is sad news, he invented not only the actor model, but also planner and did a lot of groundwork for deductive and parallel systems. One of the more obscure things he pursued as a result of his early actor model work was unbounded nondeterminism as a potential source for hyper-computation.[1] I'll always remember fondly that he pointed me to some papers via twitter when I asked him some questions about unbounded…

If I am reading the footnoted slides properly, do they mean that we are willing to use unbounded determinism when we can take the property that "actions eventually complete" as an axiom (so we prove the rest of the system based on that hypothesis, and make the statistical argument that for those almost never cases where actions don't complete, the process is so unlucky that it "has already been run over by a bus"* anyway, to justify admissability of the hypothesis)?

* thank you Jim Gray (1944-?2007). compare the difference in liveness provability between token ring and ethernet. (but also compare their pragmatic adoption)

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#7
That's very sad.

I've met him at Code Mesh in London in 2018 where he gave a keynote on ultraconcurrency for globally connected intelligent systems [1]

Joe Armstrong was present too, he had a talk later that day and I witnessed a conversation between Armstrong and prof. Hewitt about the actor model after the keynote, it was brilliant.

Unfortunately they're both gone now.

[1] paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3428114

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#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.

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#9

That's very sad. I've met him at Code Mesh in London in 2018 where he gave a keynote on ultraconcurrency for globally connected intelligent systems [1] Joe Armstrong was present too, he had a talk later that day and I witnessed a conversation between Armstrong and prof. Hewitt about the actor model after the keynote, it was brilliant. Unfortunately they're both gone now. [1] paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers…

Another video with Carl Hewitt about actors: https://invidio.xamh.de/watch?v=1zVdhDx7Tbs

Re: Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]

#10
May he RIP.

I first heard about Hewitt after watching this[0] conversation about the actor model. It's truly a masterclass. For those who want to learn more about the actor model, or simply have a fond memory of ProfHewitt, I highly recommend it.

[0] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=7erJ1DV_Tlo

Post reply on HN