I agree that Akka is ugly (my company doesn't even use it) and I totally agree that you don't need classes (and you don't really have to in Scala and Clojure...

I agree that Akka is ugly (my company doesn't even use it) and I totally agree that you don't need classes (and you don't really have to in Scala and Clojure... even in Java you can just uses classes as though they were structs). I only mention JRuby as many folks switching from Elixir are Ruby shops. Personally I find the actor model too heavy (programming wise) for local concurrency and rather use some other message passing for distributed programming (zeromq, rabbitmq, kafka, etc). I know people hate damn queues and reactive programming but that is what I know (and I admit it is less efficient and more error prone than builtin green threads (go) or actors). I realize now Elixir makes it damn easy because it is all in one package it is just a shame that there isn't some ML like language that compiles to Erlang bytecode.