Not sure whether what you saw was an artifact of your long exposure to callbacks. The Go/Erlang kinds of approaches need you to think at a slightly higher level than callbacks. A small step is the concept of a "promise" .. which, in Go, can be modeled (roughly) as a channel on which some process waits to receive a value promised to it that is being computed in another process. At a higher level are streams of data. Do you have an example you found hard to express in, say, Go without thinking "callback"?