Series Synopsis

I’ve always loved history. I find it endlessly fascinating to find out how and why we got here. That’s true of ancient history like Göbekli Tepe. And it’s true of computer science which builds on the achievements of our great pioneers that are all too frequently ignored.

I often read papers or books and after a time forget their specific content almost completely. In an effort to rectify this I’m starting a react series dedicated to the latest and greatest writings and presentations from 20-60 years ago. Without further ado, on to the first paper.

Elements of Interaction: Turing Award Lecture

Why this Paper?

It is insufficiently considered that men more often require to be reminded than informed.

I was taking a walk down memory lane looking at some references and bookmarks from a message passing framework from an MMO I worked on in the late 2000s. The system was built on concepts from Plan 9¹ among other sources. Although the company is defunct, the game never shipped, and all the code is lost to history there were a lot of cool bit of technology we built there. This paper was mentioned in some notes I had but I don’t remember the content. It was important to me back then so I’m going to reread it now and take notes.

About the Author: Robin Milner

In very short summary Robin Milner spent most of his career as an academic computer scientist and is known for 3 major contributions:

1. LCF machine assisted proof construction
2. ML the first programming language to include many of the type safety features we take for granted today
3. CCS a theoretical framework for analyzing concurrent systems

He received a Turing Award for his work in 1991 and the lecture was published later in Communications of the ACM in January 1993.

Review