On the 22^nd of June, the paper “Multiparty Languages: The Choreographic and Multitier Cases” by Fabrizio Montesi and Marco Peressotti received a Distinguished Paper Award at ECOOP 2021.

Choreographic languages aim to express multiparty communication protocols, by providing primitives that make interaction manifest. Multitier languages enable programming computation that spans across several tiers of a distributed system, by supporting primitives that allow computation to change the location of execution. Rooted into different theoretical underpinnings—respectively process calculi and lambda calculus—the two paradigms have been investigated independently by different research communities with little or no contact. As a result, the link between the two paradigms has remained hidden for long.

In the paper, Fabrizio, Marco, and their coathors, show that choreographic languages and multitier languages are surprisingly similar. They substantiate their claim by isolating the core abstractions that differentiate the two approaches and by providing algorithms that translate one into the other in a straightforward way. This work paves the way for joint research and cross-fertilisation among the two communities.

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