Occam takes minimalism to a new level-think Pascal with superpowers for concurrency. It was developed in the 1980s by David May and the Inmos team to program their transputer microprocessors. The language is grounded in Tony Hoare’s Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), making it a language where parallel processes communicate via channels-no shared variables, no race conditions, just clean determinism.

What makes Occam unique is its strict syntax and emphasis on correctness. Indentation is not merely stylistic-it is part of the grammar. It’s like Python, but even more exacting. The modern variant, Occam-π, borrows ideas from the π-calculus and introduces mobile processes and dynamic communication, making the language more powerful for complex concurrent systems.

Although Occam isn’t as popular today, its ideas live on in languages like Go and Erlang. If you’re curious about writing robust, parallel programs with minimal code, Occam is a fascinating language to explore.