The language I want to write would have built-in support for the flow of control within a single function to flow seamlessly across multiple processes/machines.

The language I want to write would have built-in support for the flow of control within a single function to flow seamlessly across multiple processes/machines. I don't mean fancy RPC. That still requires the programmer to break up the parts that run in different places into separate functions and callbacks, define the arguments that get passed between them, etc. I mean the compiler knows about the notion of a "place" and which data exists in each place. When it hits an "on (place)" construct it can figure out what needs to be passed, handling it for you between one line and the next. Fuller explanation here: http://obdurodon.silvrback.com/distributed-functions http://obdurodon.silvrback.com/distributed-functions This doesn't completely free the programmer from worrying about distributed-programming concerns such as node failure and broken connections. Nothing will. However, the fact that the flow of control and data looks like that of a local sequential program would make such code easier to write, test, and formally verify. I see a lot of bugs in the distributed systems I work on that occur because the low-level mechanisms are so intrusive that programmers can't (or just don't) test or verify the higher-level behaviors.