In describing ideal actor systems, I have talked about achieving some level of resilience by stopping wobbling actors and their correspondents. In describing this, I have used words like kill, murder, and suicide. Death before confusion is a powerful slogan, but it can lead to a very dark and unnecessary place.
So I will now be using words like stop, halt, and cease instead.
I now look at actor and think that it too may be problematic. We use it as Hewitt did, as a thing that acts, but it has much stronger associations with a person who acts. I think this small confusion has made some people suspicious of The Actor Model.
At this stage in the evolution of the model, there are lots of systems that claim to be actor systems that I think are not.
So I am going to stop using actor. Until I figure out the better word, I will be using process. Process is already a term of art, but it comes much closer to describing the communicating distributed objects that I want to build than actor does.