You can have any state you want in bolts. What Storm does not provide is a persistence mechanism for that state. For that, you can just use an external database

You can have any state you want in bolts. What Storm does not provide is a persistence mechanism for that state. For that, you can just use an external database that knows how to handle distributed state and the associated tradeoffs (such as Riak or Cassandra). The "state spout" abstraction, a future feature for Storm, will alleviate the performance problems with using an external database. Although in the time being, smart use of batching/checkpointing is sufficient for most applications. Also, Storm topologies can be written in any language. Storm has great multi-language support. I do agree though that higher level abstractions are important. That will come later, once we're confident that we've mastered the primitives for doing fault-tolerant realtime computation.