yes, people re-discover stuff, mostly beacause no-one reads older papers. I also thought of Erlang and OAA.

In the early 2000s, we used Open Agent Architecture (OAA) [1], which had a beautiful (declarative) Prolog-like notation for writing goals, and the framework would pick & combine the right agents (all written in different languages, but implementing the OAA interface through proxy libraries) to achieve the specified goals.

This was all on boxes within the same LAN, but conceptually, this could have been generalized.

[1] https://medium.com/dish/75-years-of-innovation-open-agent-ar...