David, i just noticed this paragraph.
Perhaps some sort of pi-calculus based way of describing web app logic would > allow for better reasoning. I've noodled with doing some sort of stuff with > pi-calculus in Lift. I stopped the exploration because I was unable to > find reasonable language constructs to express what I wanted economically > and in a way that a Rails or Struts or Wicket developer could pick up > reasonably easily. But, I digress. > i would have to agree with this assessment. The pi-calculus is a formal device. Just like the lambda calculus, it's a stripped down, minimal expression of some intuitions about computation (in pi's case, it's computation as interaction). That said, in the same way that lambda provides excellent guidance -- a blueprint, if you will -- for the basic design of languages like, Lisp, Scheme, OCaml, F#, Haskell and Scala, one might hope that the pi-calculus could provide some guidance or a blueprint for a new family of languages that is better suited to computing in a highly parallel, highly distributed setting, such as the web applications powered up on networks of racks and racks of multicore processors. Some examples of languages following largely similar intuitions as expressed in the pi-calculus include Erlang, Rosette and the actor "sublanguage" of Scala. People have already given a pi-calculus semantics to "core" Erlang. My PhD work was driven by my desire to give a similar account of Rosette. It took forever for me to work out a reasonable account of reflection -- which was a key feature of Rosette that i put to use in commercial, mission-critical applications. All that said, i would, and i think the whole community would also benefit from your experience and intuitions regarding what sort of language features have helped you and what didn't work out so well. Best wishes, --greg -- L.G. Meredith Managing Partner Biosimilarity LLC 806 55th St NE Seattle, WA 98105 +1 206.650.3740 http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lift" group. To post to this group, send email to liftweb@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
