ATS

So what about it? Is it the next big thing (for respectable programmers such as lisp was (and seems to still be) and C)?

I get the impression ATS forces you to work out by hand most of what Rust is designed to solve automatically. That, and the additional features it provides in terms of safety checks are not actually worth their own weight in productivity costs. Basically, it's a nice try, but it hasn't caught on for a reason.