

FAQ on Pi-Calculus (2002) [pdf] - kushti
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wing/publications/Wing02a.pdf

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yodsanklai
There has been tons of research on the pi-calculus. But very little has been
lifted to the "real world". Maybe because the pi-calculus model isn't suited
for programming (unlike the lambda calculus that led to Scheme, ML, Coq...).

I'd love to be proven wrong, but it seems to be a niche for a community of
researchers to publish useless technical papers. At least, they should devote
their energy to try to apply their results to solve real problems.

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siddboots
> ... they should devote their energy to try to apply their results to solve
> real problems.

You might instead have said this about any researcher in abstract mathematics,
computer science, and even theoretical physics.

Some people enjoy working directly on "real problems", and that is fine. But
plenty of other people enjoy working simply to push the frontier of our
knowledge, and that's also fine.

pi-calculus and lambda calculus are both theoretical frameworks, engineered
for clarity of notation and thought, in order to reason better about
theoretical problems in computation. Neither of them were designed to be
practical programming tools, and their merit does not rest on whether they
happen to inspire such tools.

~~~
yodsanklai
One thing that bothers me a little with the pi-calculus, is that unlike some
abstract maths or theoretical CS, many researchers sell their results with
potential real-life application arguments. After several decades of the same
papers studying very similar type systems and equivalence with no application,
one can legitimately starts to wonder if this is worth the effort.

