Actors are a bit of a off-the-wall paradigm (https://patterns.ponylang.org/async/actorpromise.html), and I'm (as an old network protocol guy) not sure I'm happy with the attempts to make message passing look like sequential programming (like async/await).
I kinda see where Graydon is coming from. I have this broken half-assed Pony parser combinator thing staring at me right now.
[1] https://gist.github.com/lattner/31ed37682ef1576b16bca1432ea9...