Paper: The Declarative Imperative: Experiences and Conjectures in Distributed Logic
Friday, June 18, 2010 at 7:17AM 
The Declarative Imperative: Experiences and Conjectures in Distributed Logic is written by UC Berkeley's Joseph Hellerstein for a keynote speech he gave at PODS. The video version of the talk is here. You may have heard about Mr. Hellerstein through the Berkeley Orders Of Magnitude project (BOOM), whose purpose is to help people build systems that are OOM (orders of magnitude) bigger than are building today, with OOM less effort than traditional programming methodologies. A noble goal which may be why BOOM was rated as a top 10 emerging technology for 2010 by MIT Technology Review. Quite an honor.
The motivation for the talk is a familiar one: it's a dark period for computer programming and if we don't learn how to write parallel programs the children of Moore's law will destroy us all. We have more and more processors, yet we are stuck on figuring out how the average programmer can exploit them. The BOOM solution is the Bloom language which is based on Dedalus:
