Special coordination languages have been designed, in which one can specify, analyze and control the cooperation between the various system components. An important application of such languages is in the parallelization of computation intensive sequential programs. Experimental research on coordination started at CWI in 1990. The language has found several licensees in Europe as well as the USA .
Computers nowadays do much more than mere computing.
This requires computers to interact with these agents, as expressed in the concept of Interaction Machine, proposed by P. Wegner in 1995. An Interaction Machine is an extension of a Turing Machine that can interact with its environment with new input and output primitive actions. Interaction Machines can represent the behaviour of many interesting real systems. The goal of coordination is to manage the interaction among concurrent programs. As such, coordination focuses on program patterns that specifically deal with interaction.