Crockford and the actor model
Raoul Duke posted this youtube link to PiLuD: The Message Is The Medium - Douglas Crockford
I would agree with the idea that the “Actor model” makes programming orders of magnitude simpler.
I think that FBP is simpler than what he talks about and 0D is even simpler.
I feel that a point is missed: a CPU, as originally designed, is an Actor capable of only single-threading. Moore’s Law has finally made it reasonable to think this way. The stuff about data races and memory sharing and so-called concurrency, etc. is accidental complexity caused by a concern for cheaping-out - attempting to use fewer CPUs than the number of threads that are needed for a solution.
Message-passing is fundamental, but, like GOTO, needs to be used in a “structured” manner.
How do you implement 0D with what you’ve got today? FIFO queues, send() and handle() and a dispatcher. [refs to sample code available … ]
Crockford’s goal is different than mine. Crockford’s misty language is meant as a transitional language that straddles the paradigms of traditional programming and Actor-based programming. Odin0d, on the other hand, uses diagrams to program in an Actor-like paradigm, using traditional programming inside of Components. Odin0d is used in example applications such as transpiler and find-and-replace.
Crockford gives arguments for why Actor-like programming is better than traditional programming, thereby also supporting 0D ideas.
Most implementations of Actors that I’ve seen have been hobbled by writing them in the synchronous paradigm. Trying to describe an asynchronous system starting out with a synchronous meme is harder than necessary.
See Also
Blogs
obsidian blogs (see blogs that begin with a date 202x-xx-xx-)
Videos
videos - programming simplicity playlist
Books
leanpub’ed (disclaimer: leanpub encourages publishing books before they are finalized - these books are WIPs)
Programming Simplicity Takeaways, and, Programming Simplicity Broad Brush
Discord
Programming Simplicity all welcome, I invite more discussion of these topics, esp. regarding Drawware and 0D
@paul_tarvydas
Mastodon
(tbd, advice needed re. most appropriate server(s))