Erlang has been around for decades and has most definitely stood the test of time - but where will it be 5 or 10 years from now? What do you think? And where would you like to see it or how would you like it (and the BEAM world) to evolve?
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In 5-10 years, I hope and expect to see Erlang used in new domains like OT/IT-convergence, manufacturing, smart grid.
Fields that have Telecom-like problems, in other words.
As a technology, Erlang will go where it goes. I trust it’ll be good 
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Hard to say… Erlang is developing rather slowly due to various factors. Many languages are developing much faster due to the more active community in young languages. So it would be great to have an active and big community. It would be also great to see the active development of Erlang in machine learning. Also ancillary other things like user interfaces, fault tolerant databases, big data, it would be also great to see Erlang in space(IoT maybe). And of course - all EEP’s are implemented 
. Somebody can tell that - No! Erlang was developed exclusively for certain things telecom, services etc. But let’s take a look to JavaScript(well at Node.JS) namely on Node.js Helps NASA Keep Astronauts Safe and Data Accessible or Node.js on a satellite means anyone can be a space programmer - when I first time saw this, I seriously began to worry about the safety of astronauts 
. So, if Node.js is able to be in space - why not Erlang? I hope this will change someday.
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About Erlang in space - Peer Stritzinger - Grisp: Building Space Ships With Erlang(by @peerst).
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I hope that we see more companies use it. And that we have a growing community with tools and make some more noise in s social media, also that you can build great stuff with Erlang.
But we need to kill some ghosts, like syntax discussion, or it is hard to find developers. Else I think we will see Erlang in a few companies, and it will be more of a building block for Elixir.
In the last couple of years, I heard from managers how much better Elixir is than Erlang. Like, you can’t build web applications if you don’t use Phoenix. Or that tooling and testing are much better in Elixir, so we should change from Erlang. Or Erlang is dying because of Elixir. It is hard even to get the EEF to Twitter right about Erlang. Also, all Erlang named conferences have disappeared, we have code beam that before was erlang factory/user conference, and then we have Elixir conf.
But this I see more like a bump in the road, and Erlang is a great language. In 5 - 10 years, I hope that the great Erlang community more can unify around things and improve the language. Like, have more discussions about tooling, EEP:s that is great and try together to make more noise so companies can understand that you can use Erlang for other things than telecom.
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World domination! Or should I say solar system domination?
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Oh my this talk … its been a while. Also definitely the most hung over talk I ever gave at a conference (don’t ask).
I still have my eyes on space for Erlang/GRiSP … after all RTEMS is space approved by ESA and NASA and that’s GRiSPs foundation.
Currently we see two extremes of software which I think both have no future:
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old school: where millions are spent on writing, testing and validating error free software (in C or Ada)
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yolo: really crappy software on unreliable stacks flown on cube-sats and similar
While getting stuff out of the gravity well is getting cheaper and cheaper its still shouldn’t use approach 2.
OTOH approach 1. is too expensive and doesn’t work either (first Ariane 5 exploded because of an overflow error, Mars Climate orbiter hit the planet on orbital insertion due to miles vs. metric mixup)
So we need a fault tolerant approach which takes into account that software has bugs and keeps working. Affordable ready on time but reliable software. Well there you are Erlang.
BTW the Ariane 5 software problem + Mars Climate orbiter problem were strong influences on a younger me to develop a programming language that avoids these problems. Was thinking about fault tolerance, overflow protection and units attached to data among many other things. The language was called GRiSP and the fish logo was designed for it. Then in 2007 after 10 years of free time language tinkering (wanted to get this right) I stumbled upon Erlang … which solved 80% of my problems already unlike any other language I encountered so far and was more dynamic (struggled a lot to get all kinds of static checking to help and failed to come up with something string enough). Well I always preferred dynamically typed languages anyway.
So I ditched my own language and continued my journey with Erlang.
And you all know what happened to GRiSP and the little fish 
So yes this is meant for space, just too busy on earth currently.
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I hope so too, here are just very few, but, lets say in about 5 years, I’d like to ditch C# and get a Job with a technology I really like 
Every now and then I’m trying to convince someone, but I’m still failing so far…
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I suppose Erlang community can help with it. Create a topic with asking help prepare some presentation for your company, maybe describe why you think that Erlang is a good choose and also why your company don’t want to use Erlang. I believe here we have a lot of people who was have the same issue - somebody fix it, somebody no but all those information will help you push Erlang in your company. Do not forget to indicate the direction, as this is important 
.
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Unfortunately at my current company it’s completely unthinkable.
But there’s one coworker who is interested in functional programming, and another friend is a fan of the actor model, so I’m trying to make them write some Erlang or Elixir
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I don’t want to spread it too much, that reference was a bit of a mistake. So we who know should keep it quiet. And 5 or 10 years, come on why wait that long?
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I’m hoping to see a lot more Erlang written using Gleam
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