You want two kinds of abstractions: ones that can only run locally, and ones that may be remote. For the remote kind it should be easy and transparent to run th

You want two kinds of abstractions: ones that can only run locally, and ones that may be remote. For the remote kind it should be easy and transparent to run them locally. In Erlang these are function calls vs. message sending. Some other languages like E also make that kind of distinction. I believe the bad rep of network transparency came from experience trying to cross the line in the other direction: trying to pretend remote services are local.