zigself VS armstrong-distributed-systems

I don't know about "daily" right now (I've had to take a break due to obligations), but I'm working on a modern implementation of the Self programming language with actor capabilities: https://github.com/sin-ack/zigself

It's nowhere near usable yet, but Zig has been a joy to work with for over a year, and I can definitely see myself using it for a big piece of software.

> Creating a language with the feel of a lisp, the environment of Smalltalk, and the concurrency of Erlang has been my dream for a long time.

I'm trying to eventually accomplish something like this: https://github.com/sin-ack/zigself

It's an implementation of the Self programming language in Zig, with an actor model inspired by Erlang.

The main thing to realize is that Lisp and Smalltalk are very much symmetrical in terms of structure. There is no real distinction between the two other than syntax and basic computation unit (closures vs. objects). And even closures can be used as objects and vice versa.

That only leaves the concurrency model. I have a basic implementation of actors using objects as the "context". It still has a long way to go to reach the supervisor tree model of Erlang, but interestingly enough, the ideas in the article are reflected here heavily; behaviorism is at the core of Self.

To me, most of the ever-changing and evolving technologies are rehashing or repackaging of technology and ideas from the past. I actually love coming across and diving deep into these old ideas with a fresh eye. For example, I came across Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing... which lead me to take a look at Joe Armstrong's PhD Thesis that he wrote in his 50s after 20+ years in the industry! Such a gem and a wonderful explanation of how Erlang helps you build reliable distributed systems.