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The actors model is a programming model that makes it easy to reason about highly concurrent applications. It occurred to me that I've never read an article that explains why this model is better than the traditional model of threads and locks. So I thought I'd write my opinion on this.

First, actors are an abstraction. At the end, code is run on a traditional CPU and OS and so it uses threads and locks. Actors just let us, the developers, forget about these details, like OO where objects don't really exist at the machine level.