Might I suggest that you look into a language with Actors before saying that Actors are difficult to figure out? Personally, I'm a huge fan of Io[1], which uses

Might I suggest that you look into a language with Actors before saying that Actors are difficult to figure out? Personally, I'm a huge fan of Io[1], which uses Actors extensively. Io has an incredibly minimal syntax that you (or any smart 17 year old) should be able to pick up in under a weekend - less time, if you/they have experience with a language that uses prototypical inheritance (such as JavaScript). This is pretty big, since the language doesn't impose itself or get in the way of any of the concepts that you're working with, to potentially confuse you. With Io, if you've cloned an object, you have an actor that can perform asynchronous actions for you. Its as simple as: foo := self @bar // asynchronous actor that returns a Future. [1] http://iolanguage.com/ http://iolanguage.com/