A Brief History of Distributed Programming: RPC

While many of the distributed systems we operate today are built with language like Java and Go, distributed programming has a long history of innovation and adoption of its ideas. This include innovations seen all throughout the various fields of computing: novel type systems for dynamic languages; the concept of the promise, now a standard programming technique in web development;  and unified models of programming when data lives across nodes. Some of these ideas had major impact, while some fell incredibly short. Many technically superior ideas were not adopted simply because they were too “research” focused.

During this talk, we will present the history of RPC and why RPC may not be the best abstraction for building your next distributed application.