Lambda the Ultimate

How many different basic strategies in programming language persistence seem like good ideas to support? The sort of perspective I want is a summary overview, as opposed to a detailed survey of every known tactic touched in literature. A gloss in a hundred words is better than a paper listing everything ever done in persistence.

(In chess a desire to "control the center" is the sort of basic pattern I have in mind, not an encyclopedia of all chess opening variations. In the context of PL tech, the sort of basic patterns I have in mind include image, document, database, file system, etc. But I'm interested an analytical assessment of effect of choosing a pattern.)

Some products featuring a PL as the main offering come coupled with a normative scheme for managing persistent storage. For example, Smalltalk was traditionally associated with image-based storage, though the language per se does not require it. Similarly, HyperTalk came bundled with stack-document storage as files in HyperCard. Other languages might come coupled with a database, or assume cloud-based resources.

I'm mainly interested in "local" storage schemes, like in desktop software, guiding a developer using a language in managing persistent state in session or project form. Yes, this assumes desktop software isn't dead yet. If a user creates content in documents, how does a language organize support for this? That kind of thing. Preventing users from making meaningful documents filled with self-contained data sets would be weird.

This line of inquiry comes from thinking about a language with a builtin virtual file system that unifies the interface for local and distributed data streams. How does one avoid antagonizing a user's need for documents? A document might be mounted as a file system, so saving is modeled as transacting changes on that file system, and two-phase-commit can be used to arrange consistent collections of changes across disparate stores. But this strikes me as a random data point without much context. So I'm interested in what kind of context is provided by other PL approaches to persistent services. Maybe the normal thing to do is say a language defers to an operating system or storage product.