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Comment by silentbicycle | Hacker News Reader

A .NET language with asynchronous, message-passing concurrency based on actors. Neither the website nor the programmer's guide mentions Erlang at all. Interesting.

From the programmer's guide, it looks like it has a loosely C++-like syntax, rather than the Prolog-descended syntax that Erlang uses; while I can't say I'm a fan of Erlang's syntax, I don't see any syntax for pattern matching. That would be a big loss.

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From the blog: "I don’t want to hand-wave and take credit for reaping the benefits of the web’s architecture on multi-core systems; none of these concepts are new – not even to Microsoft. Erlang is a language that has been around for years and has run many large incredibly scalable telco networks efficiently."

I'd bet this originated from MS Research, who have plenty of people who have worked on/invented actor systems predating Erlang.

I don't want to be come across as knee-jerky anti-Microsoft (I haven't used .NET; I admit ignorance there), I'm just surprised that it didn't acknowledge the one example of an actor system that programmers are likely to have heard about. It seems like it would be useful for comparison.

Besides, Microsoft employs Simon Peyton-Jones, among others, and they fund serious programming language research in various ways. I'm not implying it's dishonest on their part, I just found it a bit odd.

Sure, having used (and appreciated) Erlang I agree it would be interesting (I'm not a .NET user either or likely to become one.) I'm not surprised they omitted it, though I won't speculate why.

I just think it's worth reinforcing that there are interesting actor systems other than Erlang, and that some of the people at MSR deserve some credit in the area.

apparently the is a part of Kumo, which is v2 of the powersearch team ( post acquisition ).

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10235400-16.html

at a YC meetup i talked with a few of the powersearch guys and they seemed like pretty big fans of f# at the time.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/fs...

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