I have nothing but admiration for Erlang, and it is, without a doubt, one of the most inspired languages I've encountered in my career. But when I was at university in the late-ish nineties, they taught us Haskell as "the language of the future." So I guess some languages are forever languages of the future, but they still inspire ideas that shape the actual future. For example, Erlang monitors were one inspiration for our design of Java's structured concurrency construct [1].
If you're interested in another "language of the future" that bears some superficial resemblance to Erlang, I'd invite you to take a look at Esterel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esterel), another language we were taught at university.
I have nothing but admiration for Erlang, and it is, without a doubt, one of the most inspired languages I've encountered in my career. But when I was at university in the late-ish nineties, they taught us Haskell as "the language of the future." So I guess some languages are forever languages of the future, but they still inspire ideas that shape the actual future. For example, Erlang monitors were one inspiration for our design of Java's structured concurrency construct [1].
If you're interested in another "language of the future" that bears some superficial resemblance to Erlang, I'd invite you to take a look at Esterel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esterel), another language we were taught at university.
[1]: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/25/docs/api/java.base...