Re: A path for CSP-based Solutions towards HUGE Industrial Success.

["Stephen Maudsley" <stephen.maudsley@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "P.H.Welch" <P.H.Welch@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <java-threads@xxxxxxxxx>; <occam-com@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, 05 October, 2000 6:34 PM
Subject: Re: A path for CSP-based Solutions towards HUGE Industrial Success.


>
> Larry Dickson wrote:
>
> > >  o CSP is remembered from college days - if at all - as some pretty
> > >    hard maths ...
> >
> > But those simple diagrams you did of hardware-equivalent components
> > are not so hard.
>
> Right - of course they are not hard.  But those diagrams of hardware-like
> components are not the way CSP has been presented at most universities.
> You get that if you were a student at one of the WoTUG community colleges,
> but elsewhere you get the (hard) maths and, despite Dijkstra's best
efforts,
> most systems designers and programmers are not mathematicians :-).
>
> The beauty of occam (and, with care, the CSP libraries for C, Java etc.)
> is that the designer/programmer works with the CSP model and gets all the
> benefits from its clean compositional semantics *simply by using it*.  It
> untangles the mess that otherwise exists between serial and multithreaded
> coding and that's an enormous win.  But very few have experienced this
> (since the demise of the transputer) ...
>
> BTW Marcel: I agree with you that CSP provides (possibly) its biggest win
> in the area of concurrency within a single processor.  When I said
"transputer
> and associated hardware/software technologies", I did not mean to imply
> physically parallel computing - the transputer is an idea, not a chip!
>
> Mind you, CSP will provide some really big wins for hardware design and
for
> hardware/software co-design.
>
> And the *lightness* (e.g. 100 nano-second context switch) with which the
> CSP primitives can be managed also offers big wins for distributed
computing
> (e.g. scalable servers) ...
>
> Now, again, who wants to be a millionaire ...

Considering the opportunities for fixing the Internet I think the question
should be "who wants to be a billionaire".

It think I mentioned Esgem's recruitment campaign at Canterbury.........

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