ECL (Enterprise Control Language) is a declarative, data-centric programming language designed in 2000 to allow a team of programmers to process big data across a high performance computing cluster without the programmer being involved in many of the lower level, imperative decisions.
[1][2] ECL was initially designed and developed in 2000 by David Bayliss as an in-house productivity tool within Seisint Inc and was considered to be a ‘secret weapon’ that allowed Seisint to gain market share in its data business.
The "Hello World" program is characteristically short: Perhaps a more flavorful example would take a list of strings, sort them into order, and then return that as a result instead.
ECL primitives that act upon datasets include SORT, ROLLUP, DEDUP, ITERATE, PROJECT, JOIN, NORMALIZE, DENORMALIZE, PARSE, CHOSEN, ENTH, TOPN, DISTRIBUTE Whilst ECL is terse and LexisNexis claims that 1 line of ECL is roughly equivalent to 120 lines of C++, it still has significant support for large scale programming including data encapsulation and code re-use.
The Hadoop Map-Reduce paradigm consists of three phases which correlate to ECL primitives as follows.