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Formal methods in general are extremely clunky to use. Just see how much hate Rust gets for making it extremely difficult to make an intrusive linked list. And
by krapht 7y ago
Formal methods in general are extremely clunky to use. Just see how much hate Rust gets for making it extremely difficult to make an intrusive linked list. And memory safety is only one kind of correctness assertion.
So I'm gonna be a pessimist here and say: nope, not gonna be the future, because programmers are lazy and "ship it now" is better than "prove the bugs don't exist".
- yakshaving_jgt 7y agoNot all programmers build WordPress plugins. Some programmers write software for aircraft. The "ship it now" maxim doesn't exist in that context.
- onion2k 7y agoUnless it's Boeing.
- lonelappde 7y agoNo one is writing aircraft software in Haskell. They need good control over memory usage.
- Legogris 7y agoCounter-example: https://smaccmpilot.org/software/index.html https://smaccmpilot.org/software/index.html Also, a Haskell DSL for automotive control systems: http://tomahawkins.org/ http://tomahawkins.org/
- krapht 7y agoThat isn't a counter-example unless you're taking his post literally. In which case I claim that Python is a system programming language because one time somebody somewhere wrote a driver in it.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoWell... for 95-99%[1] of all software being written, "ship it now" beats "prove that bugs don't exist". Better formal methods could really help that 1-5%, but they're not going to impact the 95% very much. [1] All statistics made up on the spot. I think it's in the right ballpark, though.