Pony: High-Performance, Memory-Safe Actors

I absolutely love what Pony brings to the table. Unfortunately, while true, this video does nothing to sell the language.

In the video, and even on the website, it says essentially - if you don't have a hard concurrency problem, don't use Pony. Which is an absolute shame, because it's syntactically really nice, and has a lot of language features you'd desire in 202X, a really nice type system, the most sane OOP you're likely to see, a decent C FFI (WIP but usable).

Instead of scaring people away because of the learning curve of reference capabilities, they should either make the API more intuitive, or make them optional. Then you get a really nice language that can optionally benefit from the actor/model instead of a really nice language that has to carry it around like a ball and chain.

Syntactically, actors look just like classes except they have async "behaviors" instead of synchronous methods/functions. If you're not using any actors in your program, there's no reason you should have to even mess with all the reference caps because it would be essentially synchronous.

I get that that's currently it's whole identity, but it's also the biggest learning curve/burden to getting started.

EDIT: formatting