Programming languages have been developed for over five decades and there are many of them. So, why Pony? Developing high performance and scalable software systems has always been a very difficult task. With the introduction of multi-core processors, productivity using low-level languages such as C or C++ dramatically decreased. Substantial time had to be invested in debugging memory management related issues or data-race bugs. Manually synchronising concurrent memory accesses was an additional dimension programmers had to worry about, which ultimately distracted from the actual problem to be solved. Most importantly, the increase in performance, scalability and efficiency (if any) gained by programming for multiple cores was outweighed by the effort that had to be put in. We believe that a programming language should be a high-level tool to express a problem to be solved by the computer. The runtime system should, with a little help and as unintrusively as possible, figure out how t