Have a look here: http://clojure.org/state
In the section *Message Passing and Actors*, he gives his reasoning. Basically, Actors were designed for distributed programs, but that comes with added complexity and a performance hit. He wanted a simpler model, because he was mainly concerned about concurrency in same-process programming. On Wednesday, 4 February 2015 12:00:51 UTC, Gary Verhaegen wrote: > > They are different from actors because Rich is "unenthusiastic about > actors". I'm not sure there is any single piece of reference where he > himself describes exactly why he does not like actors, but here is a guess. > > Actors have one very desirable property: they encapsulate some state, and > the actor itself is responsible for managing the synchronisation of that > state. This is the part about actors that seemed worth having in Clojure. > > Actors also have some very undesirable properties, at least according to > Rich Hickey's aesthetic tastes (or more precisely, what I think his > aesthetic tastes are based on what I have seen in his speeches and > writings): they encapsulate behavior in a closed way and they hide their > internal state. > > So, like he often does, Rich separated the essence of actors into separate > pieces and recombined them in a new way, giving birth to what is now called > agents in Clojure: a piece of state responsible for its own > synchronisation, but completely open to behavioral extension and which does > not hide its internal state. Overall, openness to extension and observable > state are pretty important values in the Clojure philosophy. > > As for the name, I would assume he deliberately chose a word that was not > widely used yet for any programming language level concept (since this is a > new concept) but still reflected the notion of individuality and > responsibility for oneself embodied in the agent's responsibility for its > own synchronization. > > Of course, as agents were part of the initial Clojure release, only Rich > Hickey can give a definitive answer. > > On Wednesday, 4 February 2015, Justin Smith <noise...@gmail.com > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> In fact agents in Scala were the only version I found that were like >> Clojure in design. >> >> Beyond the fact that they exist in Scala, and the design goal was to >> replicate Clojure's agents, I didn't find that especially informative. >> >> >> On Tuesday, February 3, 2015 at 6:59:09 PM UTC-8, Leonardo Borges wrote: >>> >>> >>>> (as opposed to the combined state+behavior version of agents that one >>>> sees elsewhere) >>>> >>>> >>> Did you mean to say actors? Actor is the abstraction that bundles state >>> and behaviour together. >>> >>> Agents are different and in fact, Akka, a popular JVM actor library, >>> provides agents in addition to actors themselves: >>> http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/snapshot/scala/agents.html >>> >>> Cheers, >>> Leonardo Borges >>> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >> Groups "Clojure" group. >> To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com >> Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with >> your first post. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en >> --- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Clojure" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
