Erlang. Specifically, Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World by Joe Armstrong who designed Erlang for Ericisson. Whether or not Erlang is the right language for a particular distributed job, Erlang is a message passing system and messages are the logical construct by which any distributed system communicates among its parts. Whether they are called messages or not.

With a REPL and hot code swapping and remote launching Erlang is interactive at production scales and on a laptop.