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at:tutorial:preface [2025/06/19 16:01] – Update history after 2014 elisagat:tutorial:preface [2025/06/19 16:04] (current) – [History and design rationale] elisag
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 Perhaps the most significant change from AmbientTalk/1 to AmbientTalk/2 is the incarnation of actor concurrency in the language. In AmbientTalk/1 - inspired by other actor languages such as ABCL/1 - actors were represented as distinct so-called //active objects//, and the language explicitly distinguished those active objects from ordinary, passive objects. AmbientTalk/2, on the other hand, is based on the notion of actors as "vats" or "containers" of ordinary objects as introduced in the [[http://www.erights.org|E programming language]]. As you will read in the subsequent chapters of the tutorial, this design change shifted the emphasis from actors back onto regular objects, which in the general case makes AmbientTalk/2 programs more reusable and easier to understand. Perhaps the most significant change from AmbientTalk/1 to AmbientTalk/2 is the incarnation of actor concurrency in the language. In AmbientTalk/1 - inspired by other actor languages such as ABCL/1 - actors were represented as distinct so-called //active objects//, and the language explicitly distinguished those active objects from ordinary, passive objects. AmbientTalk/2, on the other hand, is based on the notion of actors as "vats" or "containers" of ordinary objects as introduced in the [[http://www.erights.org|E programming language]]. As you will read in the subsequent chapters of the tutorial, this design change shifted the emphasis from actors back onto regular objects, which in the general case makes AmbientTalk/2 programs more reusable and easier to understand.
  
-Since 2014, AmbientTalk/2 has been maintained by Prof. Dr. Elisa Gonzalez Boix and her PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. The language is still being used as an educational vehicle in the Master Computer Science program at VUB. It remains accessible to the general public and can be used to develop realistic distributed applications through the IntelliJ plugin.+Since 2014, AmbientTalk/2 has been maintained by [[https://soft.vub.ac.be/disco/|Prof. Dr. Elisa Gonzalez Boix]] and her PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. The language is still being used as an educational vehicle in the Master Computer Science program at VUB. It remains accessible to the general public and can be used to develop realistic distributed applications through [[https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/17635-ambienttalk# |the IntelliJ plugin]].
  
 ==== About this tutorial ==== ==== About this tutorial ====
at/tutorial/preface.txt · Last modified: 2025/06/19 16:04 by elisag