The discovery of polar nematic order and ferroelectricity is the beginning of a new chapter in the history of soft matter science, and ranks among the most important discoveries in the 150-year history of liquid crystals. With our understanding of this new phase of matter in its infancy, efforts to understand the rich physics of ferroelectric nematics will no doubt be the major topic in liquid crystal research in the coming decades. Such investigations are reliant on the development of new materials and design rules for NF materials, and in understanding how changes at a molecular level affects the bulk properties of the resulting material. Much as the promise display devices motivated the synthesis of room temperature nematic materials from the 1950s onwards, the unique combination of properties offered by ferroelectric nematics provide a clear pull towards applications; for example, tunable dielectrics, solution processable ferroelectrics, sensors. The number of materials known to exhibit the NF phase is growing exponentially and is no longer restricted to the RM/DIO type-core structures; indeed, the observation of polar nematic order in oligomeric and polymeric materials suggests that spontaneous polar order is in fact a general phenomenon. As the pool of known NF materials widens, our ability to tuning physical properties (transition temperatures, spontaneous polarization, and so on) through mixture formulation grows, enabling the tailoring of material properties towards specific applications and/or experiments. All the while, in unison with materials design and synthesis, theoretical understanding of this nascent phase of matter is evolving rapidly. The future of polar and ferroelectric nematics looks extremely bright.