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

[Raphael Korsoski]

The only dissertation on the subject that I'm aware of is Lars Åke
Fredlund's thesis from 2001: "A Framework for Reasoning about ERLANG Code"

It uses modal logic to model time; specifically an extension of the
mu-calculus in the "usual" Gentzen-style deductive framework.

If there are other approaches that have been investigated for Erlang
specifically, I'd be very interested in links etc!

/// Raphael


On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 2:17 PM, Ignas Vyšniauskas <i.vysniauskas@REDACTED>
wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 2:43 PM, Raphael Korsoski <psidrinal@REDACTED>
> wrote:
> > I'd go so far as to say that Erlang and the Actor Model are in the same
> > programming paradigm, but with different axioms in their semantics--
> > although that's of course conjecture without (large, tedious) proof....
> >
> > In my opinion, strictly separating Erlang-style concurrency and the Actor
> > model is only of academic interest; unless you are implementing, say, an
> > Erlang runtime of course. The differences are certainly relevant to
> category
> > theorists, language theorists, mathematicians working in the Curry-Howard
> > domain and so forth, but for the general programmer the differences are
> more
> > or less implementation details ("up-to the usual nonsense").
>
> I agree with you in the general spirit of "formally it doesn't matter
> much because it's mostly the same thing."
>
> However, there is one crucial thing in Erlang which, on the positive
> side makes it a very practical tool, and on the negative side makes it
> very hard to talk about formal semantics and prove things like
> progress. This is the availability of the `receiver .. after ..`
> primitive. Allowing local-timing-based behaviour in processes usually
> means that you need some very strong global fairness assumptions in
> order to do any kind of formal proofs. I don't see how one could
> obtain a (useful) representation of Erlang semantics in any of the
> usual process calculi without ignoring this fact. It would be
> interesting to find out if anyone ever did something similar formally.
>
> --
> Ignas
>
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