[jeremycarter]

My sentiments exactly - well said. The big mistake is forcing OOP onto everything. It's why I really have an affinity with the virtual actor, it has just enough OOP for me to have classes, methods and internal state - I don't need inheritance, polymorphism, etc - just naive little classifications of things we call objects.

I also don't have to think of my system in a hierarchical supervised manner like earlier actor models. I just need cloud native distributed little objects.

You can see some modern products coming out that are just that:

1. Cloudflare Durable Objects - https://developers.cloudflare.com/durable-objects/

2. Restate Virtual Objects - https://restate.dev/

[jerf]

I like supervision enough that I reimplemented it in Go myself. I have never found a very compelling reason for hierarchical supervision despite using supervision for well over a decade now in one form or another. I support it, because the supervisors themselves are also services pretty trivially. I've gotten a request to implement the other strategies, but when I asked "why", basically, there was no answer, other than "Erlang implemented it".

I find it useful architecturally to be able to have "a thing that is a service", but, if it turns into "two services", I can have that "thing" simply wrap two services internally with its own supervisor and not change its public interface to need to provide multiple services.

Reading Erlang documentation leads people to believe that they're going to create these elaborate hierarchies of actors that crash other actors if they crash and have complicated restart patterns... and I've never found anything useful other than "if this crashes, please restart it".

I'm sure the other use cases exist. It's a big world and there's lots of needs out there. However from what I can tell at least 90% of the actors in the world don't need much more than basic supervision. That is pretty useful, though. It's amazing what that can paper over out in the field sometimes.