BSEL presents: A Brief History of Types

This talk is part of the BSEL seminar series.  

About the talk

Types are one of computing's most successful concepts, they exist from the oldest to the newest programming languages. Types act as the fundamental unit of compositionality, and play important role in all aspects of software, from design to optimisation.

Unfortunately, types are probably the last thing that comes to your mind when you think about distributed systems. In this talk, I will change this misconception.  

I will (hopefully) convince you that types can be used to understand, test, specify and verify distributed systems. In particular, I will give you a crash course on session types, which were born as types for distributed processes. We will discuss the history of session type, the fundamental meaning of communication, and how to develop distributed systems that we can trust.