Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks

Wrap-Up

Alan Kay, the designer of Smalltalk and father of object-oriented programming, had this to say on the essence of object orientation:^[29]

I’m sorry that I long ago coined the term “objects” for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea.

The big idea is “messaging” … The Japanese have a small word—ma—for “that which is in-between”—perhaps the nearest English equivalent is “interstitial.” The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be.

This captures the essence of actor programming very well—we can think of actors as the logical extension of object-oriented programming ...