I don't know why people overlook the progress IBM seems to have made in the quantum computing world. Perhaps not as impressive as Google's progress but impressive none the less.
We make extensive use of Akka FSMs [1]. I find their implementation to be a lot more intuitive and less verbose than the Erlang implementation. Of course, that is in large part due to Scala's succinctness and fantastic DSL support.
FSMs make it so easy to read and debug code. It helps that Akka uses an actor system (based on Erlang's actor system), which simplifies dealing with concurrency.
> However, if the dog is sitting and you pet it, we have no idea what might happen. In the Erlang world, the dog could crash (and eventually be restarted by its supervisor).
Akka FSMs have a whenUnhandled state which can handle any event that your FSMs don't explicitly handle. Also, not handling an event doesn't cause the actor to crash. The event ends up being dead lettered.