The Actor model sounds really great, and while I haven't used Erlang in a serious context, I have used Scala Akka Actors extensively and I find them very difficult to reason about. Actors might be great if you have a huge system over the network that you need to manage, but I don't find them that great for single computer programs.
For example, I tried to implement a Akka bittorrent client and found it very difficult and confusing. You end up with a big graph of actors in which most of the messages sent are related to keeping track of state and actors.
Moreover, actors are untyped so it's not obvious what messages they accept of send. Without a lot of documentation and discipline, the code becomes extremely unreadable very very quickly. Also bugs are very hard to find and very easy to create.
Maybe it's less elegant, but for a lot of problems, just using select or epoll is a lot easier.
For example, I tried to implement a Akka bittorrent client and found it very difficult and confusing. You end up with a big graph of actors in which most of the messages sent are related to keeping track of state and actors.
Moreover, actors are untyped so it's not obvious what messages they accept of send. Without a lot of documentation and discipline, the code becomes extremely unreadable very very quickly. Also bugs are very hard to find and very easy to create.
Maybe it's less elegant, but for a lot of problems, just using select or epoll is a lot easier.