I am biased because this is my research area, but I have to respectfully disagree. Actor models are awful, and the only reason it's not obvious is because every

I am biased because this is my research area, but I have to respectfully disagree. Actor models are awful, and the only reason it's not obvious is because everything else is even more awful. But if you look at e.g., the recent work on task-based models, you'll see that you can have literally sequential programs that parallelize automatically. No message passing, no synchronization, no data races, no deadlocks. Read your programs as if they're sequential, and you immediately understand their semantics. Some of these systems are able to scale to thousands of nodes. An interesting example of this is cuNumeric, which allows you to take sequential Python programs that use NumPy, and by changing one line (the import statement), run automatically on clusters of GPUs. It is 100% pure awesomeness. https://github.com/nv-legate/cunumeric https://github.com/nv-legate/cunumeric (I don't work on cuNumeric, but I do work on the runtime framework that cuNumeric uses.)