Revenge of Pi Calculus
May 19th, 2006
Nothing pegs my BS meter like a BPM keynoter waxing poetic about pi-calculus, especially to an auditorium full of business analysts. But now it looks like the pi guys have the last laugh. I noticed Technorati’s #2 hottest new book on Amazon is, you got it, “The Pi Calculus,” with 386 new links in the last 48 hours. Wow. And at 75 bucks its a steal! What are the rest of the top 5? That would be, let’s see, The Da Vinci Code, another The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons Special Illustrated Edition, and Harry Potter 6. Yeah that makes total sense.
So what do these new linkers say? Here’s the Technorati abstract of the first one:
f.Send(new Channel(”hello!”)); Channel r = new Channel(”r”); f.Send(r); System.Console.WriteLine(r.Receive().Name); } } Special! Congratulations, you read this far! Thank you. Now…
Umm. What’s the frequency, Kenneth?
Entry Filed under: BPM
1 Comment Add your own
1. tomdebevoise | May 22nd, 2006 at 7:17 am
Bruce
I also have this book, adorning my book shelf. This is all that is does- adorn the shelf. First, in order to have any comprehension of this text, you need to have a firm grasp of abstract algebra, (group theory, ring theory, etc. etc) type theory (Ben Peirce’s book in the classic) with a sprinkling of category theory. So, you must spend months and months in advanced graduate mathematics and computer science so that you can just begin to do the proofs in the class.
Are your eyes glazing over yet?
I know enough about this stuff to firmly assert that I know nothing about this stuff.
I think this is the trendy version of having Donald Knuth’s classic ‘The Art of Computer Programming’ on your book shelf.
As BPMS’rs I think we should not loose site of the benefit of Pi-Calculus. This is a field of formal methods and formal methods has benefited computer science in many ways. For instance, Java’s strongly typed language is an offspring of formal methods. The benefit to us is more powerful abstractions and more powerful abstractions lead to less coding.
Tom
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