Linda (coordination language)

Linda is a coordination model for parallel and distributed computing, developed by David Gelernter as a doctoral candidate starting in 1979 and named after the actress Linda Lovelace. Rather than being a complete programming language on its own, Linda is meant to be paired with an existing language such as Fortran or C, adding the ability to create and coordinate separate computational activities. Its central idea is a distributed shared memory space called tuple space, holding tuples, ordered sequences of typed data up to sixteen fields long, which separate processes, called workers, can write to and read from without needing to know about each other directly. Linda reached wide use after Gelernter, Yale colleague Nicholas Carriero and Sudhir Ahuja of AT&T Bell Laboratories published the paper Linda and Friends in 1986, and by the early 1990s it had been adopted by companies including AT&T, Boeing and United Technologies, as well as by Wall Street firms, for large scale data analysis, later influencing Java based coordination systems built by Sun Microsystems and IBM. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/