1. A method, comprising: accepting as input a program written in a formal language, wherein the input program comprises a plurality of operators that enable a declarative co-grouping of one or more tables, each with an alignment function, and a specification of zero or more procedural operations to be performed on each resulting co-group; co-grouping one or more tables referenced in the program into one or more co-groups according to one or more operators of the formal language used in the program; determining zero or more user-specified operations to be performed on each co-group according to the one or more operators of the formal language used in the program; and a translator corresponding to the formal language program translating the program into one or more jobs according to the one or more operators of the formal language used in the program and based on the one or more co-groups and the zero or more operations to be performed on each co-group, wherein each job comprises one or more structured calls to an application programming interface for encoded logic that is operable to generate a plurality of tasks for the parallel processing of the job on one or more data processing devices in a distributed system.