Server-based software blows away this whole model. With server-based software you can use any language you want. A few hackers understand it, and that's why we even hear about new, indy languages like Perl and Python. We're not hearing about Perl and Python because people are using them to write Windows apps. What this means for us, as people interested in designing programming languages, is that there is now potentially an actual audience for our work.
Speed Comes from Profilers.
Language designers, or at least language implementors, like to write compilers that generate fast code. But I don't think this is what makes languages fast for users. Knuth pointed out long ago that speed only matters in a few critical bottlenecks. And anyone who's tried it knows that you can't guess where these bottlenecks are. Profilers are the answer.