Zach Klippenstein’s Reviews > Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems > Status Update

Ugh. So glad I'm not a grad student.

Discussing the idea of a "universe of actors", where every expression is really a call to an actor that performs the evaluation of that expression in the calling actor's current context and replies with the result. "Calling" an actor is asynchronous: a new actor is created to wait on the reply then continue the parent's computation.

Until now, I'd always thought of Actor concurrency as a low-level, more dynamic service-oriented architecture. Starting to see examples of defining data structures in terms of completely independent, isolated, concurrent units. Very cool! And this book/dissertation was written in the 80's.