Long posts

Milner, Robin. “Elements of Interaction.” CACM 36.1 Jan 1993. 12 pages. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=151233.151240

Robin Milner’s Turing award lecture “Elements of Interaction” illustrates the structure and significance of the pi-calculus much more ably and persuasively than Wikipedia. A good short read!

The story of a search for a distillation of concurrent computing that is as concise yet powerful as lambda calculus. Leads to the discovery of the importance of names (and so identity) to concurrent computing. Interaction over a channel (rendezvous) takes the place of reduction. That interaction though ultimately sends, not a possibly complex value, but an atomic name.