How Languages Can Save Distributed Computing

摘要

Current networked computing platforms make available to users an immense and growing amount of computing power and storage. This should be an exciting time for computing, and it is. To users, it might seem an infinitely powerful Internet Computer exists with a manifestation on each of their several computing devices. However, distributed applications are still relatively primitive and unreliable; they are too centralized on clusters provisioned by individual organizations; users find it hard to share code or even data without opening themselves up to attacks. The grit in the gears of progress is the difficulty of building applications for the Internet Computer. Our programming models are simply too difficult and low-level for programmers to use effectively. We need higher-level programming models and programming languages that get us closer to programming the Internet Computer directly.