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

[Loïc Hoguin]

On 06/24/2014 01:54 PM, Peer Stritzinger wrote:
> But I should probably give up, the "Erlang is a implementation of the
> Actor model" meme seems to be stronger than unimportant details than
> semantics.

When people talk about Erlang and actors I look at them funny. Not 
because of what you said, how Erlang isn't actors, but because that's 
completely missing the point of Erlang.

The beauty of the Erlang processes is that they were made for achieving 
fault tolerance. It is this particular aspect that make them incredibly 
good: you can focus on the happy path, "let it crash", keeping the code 
very tidy; you can detect failure and recover from it automatically, 
allowing you to sleep at night; and you don't have to deal with broken 
state.

For me Erlang is first fault tolerant, then concurrent, then functional, 
yet for many people it seems to be the opposite order. I personally care 
very little about Erlang being functional (though I do care a great deal 
about immutability and pattern matching being the default behavior, the 
rest not so much), and the concurrency is nice but only because it 
enables all the fault tolerance features of the language.

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
http://ninenines.eu