As science advances, novel experiments are becoming more and more complex, requiring a zoo of contro

As science advances, novel experiments are becoming more and more complex, requiring a zoo of control devices and electronics executing complicated sequences of steps. Device availability and monetary constrains usually lead to a highly heterogeneous setup with components from several different manufacturers using many different protocols and interfacing mechanisms. This often results in control software being puzzled together to use and provide a multitude of interfacing and control functionality, each using their own calling conventions, data structures, etc. To make matters worse, usually a group of relatively independent programmers is trying to write and maintain the code base. Often this causes extensive duplication of effort as program segments are hard to reuse, since unpredictable changes to the segments by the original authors might compromise other code using these segments.