Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Sun, 09 May 2004
Programming without a call stack
Ted Neward had an interesting comment on one of the talks at TheServerSide Symposium:
Every developer on the planet, both Java and .NET, needs to stop and think about ways to focus on messaging, even between classes, rather than straight method calls, not because this is the silver bullet that solves all your concurrency issues, but that in certain cases it can certainly reduce them.
Using "real messages" (as opposed to calling function calls messages) to communicate between objects was a feature of the Actor model of computation invented by Carl Hewitt. I spent a little bit of time on Actors. I took 6.835 my senior year at MIT, and when I went to Brown I was originally interested in working on Actor language problems before I got diverted off into object database stuff.

There's another interesting tie-in. I was reading Carlos' post on designing usable API's, which referred to the Curried Object pattern. The Curried Object pattern feels very Actorish to me. The notion of returning an appropriate intermediary is very much like the become step of an actor computation. Of course, the notion of an object with just the right set of methods (my interpretation of "an appropriate intermediary") feels sort of like a capability.

As you can see, a number of things have been swirling around in my brain...

[23:20] | [computers/programming] | # | TB | F | G | 6 Comments | Other blogs commenting on this post






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I work at the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF).
The opinions expressed here are entirely my own, not those of my employer.

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