I always thought CORBA was an impenetrable and boring enterprise technology. But it turns out its history and design lessons are far more interesting.
@amoroso I never used CORBA, but my impression is that it was simply the wrong paradigm for distributed applications: cooperating distributed objects are too much fine-grained, and the communication overhead can kill the performances, better using distributed services with a service-oriented API; trying to hide the fact that an object can be remote instead of local creates problems, because code is usually not transparent to these aspects; etc...
In Erlang, the Actor paradigm follows the contrary approach of CORBA: Actors are remote by default, and if they are local it is simply better for the performances. So one can decompose the problem using already a distributed friendly API.
