Scala for Data Science

Actors as people

In the previous section, you learned that an actor encapsulates state, interacting with the outside world through messages. Actors make concurrent programming more intuitive because they behave a little bit like an ideal workforce.

Let's think of an actor system representing a start-up with five people. There's Chris, the CEO, and Mark, who's in charge of marketing. Then there's Sally, who heads the engineering team. Sally has two minions, Bob and Kevin. As every good organization needs an organizational chart, refer to the following diagram:

Let's say that Chris receives an order. He will look at the order, decide whether it is something ...