With the recent, vivid trend towards multicore hardware and the ever growing application requirements, concurrency is no more a niche area it used to be, and is slowly becoming a norm. In this talk, we will talk about promises/futures, one of the concurrency models that has risen to the occasion. We will look at what they are, how they're implemented and used in Java and Javascript. We will see how Scala, with its functional paradigm and greater abstraction capabilities, avoids "callback hell" typically associated with the model, allows writing of concurrent code in "direct style", and thereby greatly reduces the cognitive burden, allowing you to focus on application logic better.