Baked in a Pi...

Microsoft, beyond any reasonable discussion of their success as a business and the merits of their software, has always generated a certain enmity in the computer science community.

Microsoft, to that world, is unclean, because unlike most of their peers, Microsoft rose to prominence outside academia, with software that academic critics believed had (at best) impure theoretical underpinnings. Microsoft in this is an outlier, because the conceptual core of most tech companies is some gem of computer science.

Oracle is pure (again, independent of the merits of the folks within) because they can trace their history to the seminal paper by E.F. Codd

Adobe is pure because the graphics language Postscript originally descended from Forth, at Evans & Sutherland (who are themselves pure because of Sketchpad). And so on.

Even Google has made a play for CompSci street cred

All this matters, because there is a prevailing belief in the software industry that, with that certain exception, you have to have a pure core to have differentiating value as a software company.

The reason this matters to us is that, for the rest of the BPM industry, the pure theoretical core on which they all rest is a cool branch of applied mathematics known as Pi calculus. Pi calculus is a mathematical formulism for independent, communicating processes, and it applies to BPM as an underpinning to describe non-sequential business processes. The O'Reilly book Essential Business Process Modeling devotes a whole chapter to Pi-calculus, petri nets, and the theoretical forebears of today's BPM doodleware generators.

So where does that leave us?

I've had a fascinating couple of weeks fleshing out the theoretical underpinnings of our software, and the Hohpe presentation will give some interesting background. There will be some posts and papers on this to follow...