It is a [[Type_systemType system#STATIC|statically typed]] [[Functional programming|functional programming language]] promoting [[parallel computing]]. It features a versatile [[foreign function interface]] allowing users to integrate software from many external programming languages. At the organizational level Cuneiform provides facilities like [[Conditional (computer programming)|conditional branching]] and [[Recursion|general recursion]] making it [[Turing completeness|Turing-complete]]. In this, Cuneiform is the attempt to close the gap between scientific workflow systems like [[Apache Taverna|Taverna]], [[KNIME]], or [[Galaxy (computational biology)|Galaxy]] and large-scale data analysis programming models like [[MapReduce]] or [[Pig (programming tool)|Pig Latin]] while offering the generality of a functional programming language.
Cuneiform is implemented in distributed [[Erlang (programming language)|Erlang]]. If run in distributed mode it drives a [[POSIX]]-compliant distributed file system like [[Gluster]] or [[Ceph_Ceph (software)#CephFS|Ceph]] (or a [[Filesystem in Userspace|FUSE]] integration of some other file system, e.g., [[Apache_HadoopApache Hadoop#HDFS|HDFS]]). Alternatively, Cuneiform scripts can be executed on top of [[HTCondor]] or [[Apache Hadoop|Hadoop]].<ref>{{cite web|title=Scalable Multi-Language Data Analysis on Beam: The Cuneiform Experience by Jörgen Brandt|url=http://beta.erlangcentral.org/videos/scalable-multi-language-data-analysis-on-beam-the-cuneiform-experience-by-jorgen-brandt/#.WBLlE2hNzIU|website=Erlang Central|accessdate=28 October 2016}}</ref><ref>
{{Cite journal
| last1 = Bux | first1 = Marc
Line 106:
| volume = 5
| number = 1,
| pages = 42-5042–50
| year = 2010
| publisher = Elsevier
}}
</ref>
In this, Cuneiform is distinct from related workflow languages based on [[dataflow programming]] like [[Swift (parallel scripting language)|Swift]] or Nextflow.<ref>
{{cite journal
| title = Nextflow enables reproducible computational workflows
