Persistent Foundations for Scalable Multi-Paradigmal Systems

Problems with the inconsistent behaviour of system construction components for building large and long-lived application systems are identified. They make the programmer’s task harder and the user’s world more confusing in the same way that the disharmonies between programming languages and databases did. Persistent programming languages overcame those disharmonies.This paper challenges researchers to design and build a common substrate to the construction components. The construction components would be re-built using the substrate to achieve consistent behaviour. Application systems would then use this new family of construction components. The substrate, called the Scalable Persistent Foundation promises several advantages: consistent application system behaviour even when under stress, accelerated application system building and maintenance, genuine longevity of application systems and improved operational efficiency.The search for a design and implementation of this foundation will provoke debate about what behaviour, in the context of distribution, overload, failure, change, concurrency, transactions, safety, security, etc. is wanted.Experiments using short-lived computations and small-scale systems are rarely useful in predicting large-scale and long-term behaviour. Therefore large-scale apparatus and long-term experimental procedures are required.