The Howdy Glossary

Obliq is a programming language and system for distributed computing developed by AT&T Bell Laboratories in the 1990s. It introduced the concept of transparently moving objects through a network and across different machines. Obliq’s type-safe approach made it suitable for building large-scale, fault-tolerant systems that could automatically adapt to changes in network topology — such as computers joining or leaving a local area network — without requiring manual reconfiguration. While not as widely used today, Obliq remains influential in shaping modern languages designed for distributed computing and cloud computing environments.