The drive for fault-tolerance, distributed computing and on the other hand, speed, are all becoming prominent leaving Erlang in a good place right now, but in need of other major changes in the computing world. Wrapping languages or 'dropping down to C' is no longer going to cut it, even if it is low-hanging fruit. Rust or Pony's guarantees only hold if you stay in their pen. We need a way of marrying PLs like Erlang/LFE/Elixr and Pony to newer hardware paradigms to take advantage of all those multicores, and potentially custom FPGA vs. ASIC chips rigs that will be arriving to market. Why Erlang matters is that it showed you can allow for failure, albeit brief and inconsequential failure, to succeed. No zero-risk or failure here. Acceptable bounds that are easy to see now, but revolutionary at the time. Custom hardware is already in use at HFT and bitcoin mining companies. The U.S. is going to try and beat China's Tianhe-2, that is currently the world's fastest supercomputer. I'm not sure why, since the Chinese scientists say it would take a decade of programming to utilize the potential of the Tianhe-2's hardware. If you think I'm calling the spirit of Lisp Machines from the dead, you're close ;) I think the von Neumann HW architecture, and its straddled type of OS, are straining at the edges of high-stakes usage, not the common user. We don't need supercomputers, we need new hardware architectures at a lower-level than 'super', that can be programmed in months not decades. Programming languages in the OTP/BEAM category, old, battle-tested languages like APL and J, which have always dealt with the array as their unit of computation, will be the basis for new languages, or they will be adapted in an new one. The money, big data, and mission-critical business needs will drive it to market.