Many have pointed out a number of implementations of the model you mentioned. This is generally known as the actor model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_mo

Many have pointed out a number of implementations of the model you mentioned. This is generally known as the actor model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model) in which messages are passed between a number of distinct actors. This is actually a fantastic model for distributed systems and was implemented in the Erlang programming language for that very purpose. It is the other major model of concurrent computing outside of having some kind of shared memory space (in a true actor model there is no shared mutable data).