I would like to see Haskell fill C's niche: it's close to C's
execution speed now, and pure functions and a terse style gives real
advantages in coding speed (higher-order functions abstract common
"patterns" without tedious framework implementations), maintainability
(typeclasses of parameters in utility functions means you don't write
different implementations of the same function for different types,
yet preserve type compatibility and checking), and reliability (pure
functions don't depend on state, so have fewer moving parts to go
wrong).

Do you know of any garbage collectors written in Haskell?  Do
you know of any thread/process schedulers written in Haskell
that can schedule arbitrary code (ie. not just code that is
written in a continuation monad)?

I would like to see a language that lets you write low level code
(like memcpy) efficiently, in a style that makes reasoning about
the code easy, and which doesnt require (but can coexist and support)
garbage collection.

"while(n--) *p++ = *q++;"
is still quite elegant compared to many other expressive langauges.
setjmp and longjmp are still quite powerful.

Jason Catena

Tim Newsham
http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/