[erlang-questions] Erlang is *not* a implementation of the Actor model Re: Go vs Erlang for distribution

[Miles Fidelman]

zxq9 wrote:

> I think the more important aspect here being that its very hard to be happy
> with concurrency in a world where you have to handle every combination of
> message*state, and that means fault tolerance is a neccessary component of any
> environment where one can happily build large concurrent systems. In
> particular, any large system is non-trivial, and concurrency itself is non-
> trivial. Without fault-tolerance you wind up with an explosively complex fault
> situation to handle.
>
>
> Come to think of it, I don't think it would be very easy to apply Erlang's
> concept of fault-tolerance without pattern matching as a central feature in
> many areas of the language. I could be wrong, I'm just trying to imagine an
> alternative without pattern matching -- and I don't see any alternative than
> to emulate it with exclusive guards or something (which still equates to
> pattern-matching, just less easy to read), which in the extreme case is almost
> as bad as the common practice in some languages of actually enumerating every
> negative case -- which usually vastly outnumber the positive cases -- and
> providing an exception handler for each.
<snip>

Well, falling further down the rabbit hole ....

I kind of agree with you that massive concurrency and fault-tolerance go 
hand-in-hand.

On the other hand, I kind of see pattern matching as more associated 
with message-oriented communication:  Somehow I don't see doing a lot of 
message selection and processing without pattern matching at the front end.

Cheers,

Miles

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra