Kohei Honda died of a stroke on Monday 3 December 2012. It was sudden, and many of us still have not taken it in. My recent
paper is a direct descendant of Kohei's work on session types, and I had been fortunate to have the opportunity to work with him on a grant proposal in the last few months. I spent some time liaising with the W3C on XML and Sun on Java, so I can appreciate the far greater effort involved in Kohei's work liasing with the W3C on
WS-CDL, with Cognizant, Red Hat, and VMWare on
Scribble and
Savara, and with the
OOI, all on applications of session types. Few academics both make deep technical contributions and successfully communicate these to practitioners. I am sure the theoretical computing community will continue to build on his work, and I hope more computer scientists will emulate his efforts to liaise with practitioners, which should serve as a role model for us all.
# posted by Philip Wadler @ 6:25 PM
