Software development is a defect injection process. With every line of code we write, we have a chance of introducing unintended behavior into the system. This chance increases with conceptual complexity. The more difficult a system is to understand, the greater our chance of introducing defects. In his 1980 Turing Award lecture, Tony Hoare said […]
02
Jul
2012
Debugging Actor Systems
Tags: actor, composition, consistency, debugging, instrumentation, logging, observation, proof, provenance, reasoning, testing
09
Jan
2011
Playing the Stooge with Humus
Happy New Year and welcome to 2011. With the coming of the new year, I’m happy to announce the availability of a simulator/debugger environment for Humus, (Note: the 2011 version has been archived). Please note that this is a simulator of the Humus language written in JavaScript, so it runs very slowly. It is intended […]
17
Jun
2010
Actors in Clojure – Why Not?
Tags: actor, blocking, Clojure, data-flow, deadlock, debugging, distribution, Erlang, functional, protocol, scalability, value
In his article about state management in Clojure, Rich Hickey discusses his reasons for choosing not to use the Erlang-style actor model. While Erlang has made some implementation choices that can lead to problems, the problems are not intrinsic to the Actor Model. As the actor implementation with the longest history of success, Erlang naturally […]