Programming languages offer a number of abstractions such as dynamic typing, sandboxing, and automatic garbage collection which, however, come at a performance cost. Looking back, the most influential programming languages were proposed at a time when Moore’s Law was still in place. Nowadays, post-Moore’s law, scalability, and elasticity become crucial requirements, leading to an increasing tension between programming language design and implementation, and performance. This talk will discuss the impact of programming languages and language runtimes in the context of scalable and elastic cloud computing platforms with the goal of forecasting their role in the new cloud era.