I saw a Joyent manta demo at a node.js roadshow/meet-up a year or so ago, and it was impressive. It's lovely to see the action (code)/object (data) relationship rethought, whereby they said "let's bring the tools to the data instead of lugging data to the tools." It's also cool, refreshing, and validating to see "the tools" being Unix. "Imagine you want to grep across a dataset and sort those records and pull out some key fields with awk..." No need to imagine: that could be your exact plan, using the familiar tools you know and love.

I'm looking forward to trawling (ha! more nautical theming!) this code for the education, and maybe some gems.

Edit: close quote, autospell fixing.