And Elixir/Erlang is actually more imperative and stateful than some other functional languages, because of the process model. Sending messages imposes an order

And Elixir/Erlang is actually more imperative and stateful than some other functional languages, because of the process model. Sending messages imposes an ordering on the receiver's state. One way you can think of a mailbox is as a continuously-updating imperative program that runs on the "CPU" of its process.