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That's mostly because BEAM uses an actor-style approach while predating the concept of actors, isn't it? Interesting artefact of history if so

Edit: upon rechecking, apparently that's not exactly right, and Erlang designers learned of actors after designing the language, which makes it all the more interesting

Actors predate both Erlang and BEAM by significant factor

I've spent the last decade in erlang / elixir / OTP. I think a lot of the naming comes from the early use of erlang as effectively an "OS" for telecom switches.

I always joke that BEAM wants to be the operating system.

> I've spent the last decade in erlang / elixir / OTP.

Do you have a blog? I would love a peek into your unique experience.

They are (lightweight) processes since they have no shared memory. Each process has its own stack and heap.

I've never thought about it that way, but that makes sense!

The terminology in Erlang predates green threads by a decade or so.