Lambda the Ultimate

From the abstract of Per Brand's Ph.D. thesis,
The Design Philosophy of Distributed Programming Systems: the Mozart Experience, which has just appeared (dated June 2005):

Distributed programming is usually considered both difficult and inherently different from concurrent centralized programming. It is thought that the distributed programming systems that we ultimately deploy, in the future, when we've worked out all the details, will require a very different programming model and will even need to be evaluated by new criteria.



The Mozart Programming System, described in this thesis, demonstrates that this need not be the case. It is shown that, with a good system design, distributed programming can be seen as an extended form of concurrent programming. This is from the programmer's point-of-view; under the hood the design and implementation will necessarily be more complex. We relate the Mozart system with the classical transparencies of distributed systems. We show that some of these are inherently on the application level, while as Mozart demonstrates, others can and should be dealt with on the language/system level.

[...]

The full range of the design and implementation issues behind Mozart are presented. This includes a description of the consistency protocols that make transparency possible for the full language, including distributed objects and distributed data-flow variables.