RE: AW: The world needs process-orientation

["Tony Gore" <Tony@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My two penn'orth

In my years supporting customers, there was a clear distincton between
two groups, which I will simplify.

Basically, engineers liked occam - CSP gave them a programming model
that looked comparable to the way they designed systems. Most
programmers hated it because it wasn't C and they couldn't do all the
nasty fiddling around to show how clever and innovative they were at
programming i.e. no pointers, no GOTO etc. 

Whenever I taught occam on courses, I concentrated on the basic
sequential programming syntax until they had the hang of it and then
introduced the parallelism. This avoided users confusing learning a new
language with learning parallelism.

I joined Inmos from Motorola where I was programming real time
automotive systems in assembler, and after a few weeks discovered that
PAR and channels gave me all the things I previously had to write for
myself

I really do wish, even largely as a user of software today, rather than
a writer, that CSP was used in design - for example, Microsoft's SBS 4.5
included ISA server - a firewall. Except that some ports bypassed the
firewall and were open to SQL server and led to the Digispid worm. It is
extremely difficult as a network/server administrator to figure out how
information travels around the system.

However, reading the exchanges in this forum, I can see that there is a
possibility for resurrecting COP/POP interest. We are using systems that
are more and more distributed, but there is not really a language for
programming networked systems. Surely this is an opportunity to reassert
a CSP approach. Perhaps we need a "CSP network programming language"
which can be used to hook up code written in other languages, but can
also be used to program on its own. This is a sort of Trojan Horse
approach.

Tony Gore

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