[ravestar]

Well, the purpose of distributed programming is to be distributed first. Is this language targeting desktops/servers only? What about Android/iOS/WP/BB and rest of the mobile world?

[felipehummel]

I think "distributed" in this context is about multiple machines/servers. Not multiple plataforms.

[nightski]

Languages don't target platforms imho.

Implementations may, but that is made nearly impossible by the incredible amount of vendor lock in built into every platform you listed.

[ravestar]

Languages are platforms.

Vendor lock-in exist for specialized areas (eg. documents, protocols). There are areas when some producers _must_ support common standards. Microsoft for ex. had to introduce support for native code in WP8. HTML/JS is a second area where support from vendor is a must. OpenGL is next one (not for WP, but its a minor platform, but... surprise, surprise Microsoft supports WebGL!).

For ex. nobody is forcing anyone to use native libraries for GUI (Qt, Swing, WPF). There are GUI libs completely independent from OS ( http://l33tlabs.org/ http://kivy.org/ http://www.pharo-project.org/about/screenshots ).

Smalltalk/Pharo application developed on Windows or Linux Machine can be deployed on iPad or Android and it will work without a single byte change. These things are made by single individuals as hobby projects with a great success.

You are wearing a corporate blindfold.

[stass]

Language is not a platform, it is a way to describe a computation. In this particular case, the researchers discovered that using a relational language to describe state transitions in a distributed systems helps to reason about the distributed system and reduces the amount of code required to describe it's behavior significally. It is in no way dependent on any particular platforms, as it is some kind of libary you have to plug somewhere, it is a /language/.