This paper discusses the current resurgence of interest in the Linda coordination language for parallel and distributed programming. Particularly in the Java field, there have been a number of developments over the past few years. These developments are summarised together with the advantages of using Linda for programming concurrent systems. Some problems with the basic Linda approach are also discussed and a novel solution to these is presented. The power and flexibility of the proposed extensions to the Linda programming model are illustrated by considering a number of example applications, including a detailed case study of visual language parsing. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.