When I write about Akka.NET and the actor model, this is not what I mean:
I’m probably going to abuse this stupid joke in every 100-level blog post and video where I introduce the concept of Actors, so please bear with me.
In all seriousness, an actor is a broad concept. Here’s my layman’s definition of the actor model:
An “actor” is really just an analog for human participants in a system. Actors communicate with each other just like how humans do, by exchanging messages. Actors, like humans, can do work between messages.
Think of something like a call center, where hundreds of customers might call a 1-800 number and have concurrent conversations with one of many possible customer service agents.