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Discussion on: What great software invention or idea never gained adoption?

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ulitroyo profile image
Uli Troyo

The late Pieter Hintjens once said in a tweet that there are three things that more developers should know about:

  1. State machines
  2. The actor model
  3. Model languages

We now have X-State for using state machines to manage state in web applications, and state machines are used extensively in game development.

The actor model doesn’t get as much love, but you have actor model frameworks for every language, plus you have Erlang, plus Actix is one of the fastest web frameworks (written in Rust) and I’m pretty sure it gets its name from the actor model.

But model languages? I still don’t really understand what those are. I remember Hintjens clarifying that they are not mere domain-specific languages. I think they are languages used for code generation? I’m not sure, and he isn’t around to ask.

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jopie64 profile image
Johan • Edited

I think the actor model doesn't get as much love because the original idea was misunderstood and object oriented programming as interpreted by Java arose as the defacto standard. Such a shame, if only it was implemented correctly like how it was meant to be like in erlang, the actor model may now have been the most popular paradigm instead of OOP...

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aschwin profile image
Aschwin Wesselius

The actor model will be the most prominent next step after the micro-services hype. It's already here and a lot of vendors are preparing their product for/with them too.