Erlang and Haskell give you a sequential programming model for I/O (and everything else) within each actor process. You can read from a file, take a result from

Erlang and Haskell give you a sequential programming model for I/O (and everything else) within each actor process. You can read from a file, take a result from it, do a database query then post a message to another process. In Akka, you must use asynchronous I/O directly, or use a thin abstraction such as Futures with monadic bind to accomplish the same thing. Under the covers, the Haskell and Erlang runtimes are handling this for you so that you can forget about the fact that you are doing async I/O. In Akka, if you don't pay attention to this and use a non-NIO Java library to do I/O, you will block the entire scheduler. Whereas, every library in the Erlang and Haskell ecosystems already uses the async I/O abstractions in the runtime.