Of course it's easier to understand. It's also much easier to get wrong. Just yesterday I messed around with running a small process on to ship subscribed messa

Of course it's easier to understand. It's also much easier to get wrong. Just yesterday I messed around with running a small process on to ship subscribed messages across node boundaries and forgot the recursive call in one of 4 cases, leading to mysterious stopping. In Elixir you don't even have to define all of this boilerplate, just the functions you actually need. Also, the callbacks are not classical methods, a handle_call doesn't have to reply immediately, for example. Distinguishing info, call and cast is also very relevant. If you wanted something like {:ok, agent} = Agent.start_link ... agent.get() I think you would need a change in the BEAM to recognise that agent is a "particular kind of PID".