Do reactive programming and pi-calculus have things in common?

Question

Do reactive programming and pi-calculus have things in common?

Answer 1

In short, yes. Technically the Pi-calculus could probably encode something like higher-order reactive programming (as you can dynamically create and pass around channels as first-class values).

At a superficial level, both attempt to describe a system in terms of events, rather than states. This is an important distinction that gives rise to the field of 'event-based systems'. The Pi-calculus is extremely general, and it's quite likely that anything you could construct in a reactive programming setting would have a reasonably natural encoding as pi-calculus terms.