How can one recognize coordination languages and technologies? As this report
shows, the common approach that contrasts coordination with computation is
intellectually unsound: depending on the selected understanding of the word
"computation", it either captures too many or too few programming languages.
Instead, we argue for objective criteria that can be used to evaluate how well
programming technologies offer coordination services. Of the various criteria
commonly used in this community, we are able to isolate three that are strongly
characterizing: black-box componentization, which we had identified previously,
but also interface extensibility and customizability of run-time optimization
goals. These criteria are well matched by Intel's Concurrent Collections and
AstraKahn, and also by OpenCL, POSIX and VMWare ESX.Comment: 11 pages, 3 table