Oh Data! Where are you?

Here’s an interesting idea for distributed computing when you have large amounts of data spread across numerous machines - move your code around (as ruby/scala/what-have-you continuations) instead of moving your data around. 

It’s a research language called swarm:

http://blog.locut.us/main/2008/10/6/swarm-a-true-distributed-programming-lang…

http://code.google.com/p/swarm-dpl/

It’s kinda like when you’re in a library (the physical kind with heavy books, dusty shelfs and smelly aisles), and you pause reading a book to walk to the reference section to look up a word before walking back and continuing your book.

The coolest part is that most continuations can be contained in a single network packet - so there shouldn’t be much network traffic bouncing around if you’ve partitioned your data vis-à-vis your problem domain.