So what I personally find interesting about this code is how it just... asychronously kicks off arbitrary functions. It reads like scripting except it isn't.

I ask out of curiosity: are there other statically typed languages where you can do stuff like this? Java has Futures, but those are far more heavyweight. Clojure has concurrency constructs which are pretty close, but Clojure is dynamic. I only know a little bit of Haskell, so there might be something like this in there.