14. The media of claim 8 , wherein the number of structured calls is minimized through query optimization.
8. One or more computer-readable non-transitory storage media Embodying software operable when executed by one or more computer systems to: accept 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-group 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; determine 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 translate 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.