The go blocks in here are really ugly, but to be honest I just found it difficult to refactor in this particular case. The issues were a) I wanted all the events in a single event loop to make timing issues clear and to fit the model semantics better b) core.async go blocks, because they are macros, can't be refactored like functions (>! and such need to be in a go block) and c) the sync logic otherwise was easier to reason about with all of the logic in one place. One better way to factor this would be to have a declarative format for what each action performs, but it ended up being more difficult to follow the logic when I refactored it this way. Types would help, and I think in general there is unexploited potential for types and CSP and FRP approaches. But if you have suggestions for how to make this better I'm all ears.