Hewitt, Meijer and Szyperski: The Actor Model (everything you wanted to know...)

What Hacker News said

Strong rec napsterbr · 2021-03 · on “A few notes on message passing”

I'm sorry to go completely off-topic here, but I just wanted to say thank you! Your discussion[0] with Meijer and Szyperski was mind-blowing and taught me a lot about the actor model. This was, hands down, one of the best classes I've ever had. Thanks for sharing this knowledge. [0] - [this video]

Strong rec napsterbr · 2023-01 · on “Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]”

May he RIP. I first heard about Hewitt after watching this[0] conversation about the actor model. It's truly a masterclass. For those who want to learn more about the actor model, or simply have a fond memory of ProfHewitt, I highly recommend it. [0] - [this video]

Strong rec TowerTall · 2023-01 · on “Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]”

This is one of my favorite tech talks. Hewitt, Meijer and Szyperski: The Actor Model (everything you wanted to know but are afraid to ask) [this video]

Strong rec matesz · 2025-07 · on “Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language”

For anyone interested in a deeper dive into the foundations of the Actor Model, I highly recommend this entertaining 45-minute explainer by Carl Hewitt, one of the model’s original pioneers: [this video]

Recommends prodtorok · 2017-09 · on “Get to Know the Actor Model with JavaScript”

For those who like to learn from videos, here is an interview/lesson from Carl Hewitt (he introduced the model): [this video]

Recommends helge9210 · 2022-04 · on “Actor system for the JVM developed by Electronic Arts”

> so different in an actor vs a queue with workers In short: different computational model -- Actor model vs. Communicating sequential processes. This really helped me: [this video] Edit: added link to video

Cites noblethrasher · 2015-09 · on “Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users”

Indeed, Joe Armstrong once said that he believes Erlang to be the only OO language according to Alan Kay's idea [1]. Also, let's not forget to give credit to Carl Hewitt who came up with actors in the first place [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]

Cites ahasani · 2020-03 · on “Writing an OS in Rust: Async/Await”

What do you think about hierarchical state machine [1] ? >Has it already been through state X? Like everything else, logging >Will it come back to this state in the future? Mentioned in the comment before, there is a transition graph that you can do static analysis on, note that you might run into a halting problem >Is there a route from state Y to state Z? There is a transition graph >State machines are effectively goto writ large... quoting Prof Carl Hewitt of Actor Model, "goto is harmless"[2], function/procedure call is a goto, much like sending an named event while in particular state with/out parameters [1] [LINK] [2] [this video] note: edited for formatting