May he RIP.
I first heard about Hewitt after watching this[0] conversation about the actor model. It's truly a masterclass. For those who want to learn more about the actor model, or simply have a fond memory of ProfHewitt, I highly recommend it.
That's very sad.
I've met him at Code Mesh in London in 2018 where he gave a keynote on ultraconcurrency for globally connected intelligent systems [1]
Joe Armstrong was present too, he had a talk later that day and I witnessed a conversation between Armstrong and prof. Hewitt about the actor model after the keynote, it was brilliant.
Unfortunately they're both gone now.
[1] paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3428114
Sad news. Some of the early papers on actors are listed at http://erights.org/history/actors.html (with a bunch of broken links, unfortunately, but they should be findable).
Another really stimulating paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3115052_The_Scienti... proposing that powerful problem-solvers could be organized like a model of the human scientific community.
Dang it, we lost 2 of the biggest champions of the Actor model, Carl and Joe a couple of years ago. Who is left to carry the torch to illuminate millions of developers who have no idea or have never heard of the Actor model? Sadly, we will see thousands or poorly thought out replacement models (eg. C++ futures, thread pools etc), which only offer a subset of Actor functionality instead of implementing the whole she-bang. E
If I am not mistaken, he is the researcher behind the actor model. He was also active on HN, I remember.
This is a real loss. I learned a lot from him, ironically more from late night trips to Chinatown than formally in the lab. He had a wide ranging intellect that did not diminish with age.
The actor model is simply magnificent. Once i encountered the actor model, concurrency just clicked for me. Even writing concurrent programs in a non-actor context became simple and easy. It is that amazing.
Sad news. I had the honor of participating in a workshop he organized on Inconsistency Robustness in 2011, that was an interesting gathering.
https://www.amazon.com/Inconsistency-Robustness-Studies-Logi...
@dang, I move to show the black bar for this sad event. It has been almost a month, but it's the first mention on HN.
RIP Carl Hewitt.
A mind that was never confined to a box. Always fresh, adventurous, and insightful, to the end.
Hugely inspirational. Wish I could have attended one of his lectures or talks.
My very first computer as an HP. My dad came home with one from CompUSA back in the mid-90s. I think this was shortly after Packard Bell rebranded themselves. I don't know what involvement Carl had with the company by that point in time, but he indirectly had an impact on me as it got me started in computers very early in life. RIP.
This is sad news, he invented not only the actor model, but also planner and did a lot of groundwork for deductive and parallel systems.
One of the more obscure things he pursued as a result of his early actor model work was unbounded nondeterminism as a potential source for hyper-computation.[1]
I'll always remember fondly that he pointed me to some papers via twitter when I asked him some questions about unbounded nondeterminism as an undergrad.
[1]: https://programme.hypotheses.org/files/2019/06/cardone_dayli...