OK fair enough. But just with regard to your original point -- people should "care" about higher level distributed systems abstractions, and they do (to an ext

OK fair enough. But just with regard to your original point -- people should "care" about higher level distributed systems abstractions, and they do (to an extent). I think the main example of a higher level abstraction in wide use is message queues (which I think of as a descendant of tuple spaces, but that point is immaterial). If your only concept is RPC, that's just too low level and limited, and you're going to end up with a mess. You're right that "developers understand RPC" (in a naive way). But that's just because we are still in the early stages and knowledge hasn't had time to propagate. Some RPC systems have more of the naive properties that the OP was pointing to; some have learned from those mistakes.