4 ms·
Any thoughts on Alloy? I wonder what's preventing formal methods from becoming a more standardized practice when designing complex interconnected systems or mi
by ex4 7y ago
Any thoughts on Alloy?
I wonder what's preventing formal methods from becoming a more standardized practice when designing complex interconnected systems or microservices.
I mean, I know they are not as "friendly" as writing tests using mocha or pytest, but why can't someone build an npm version of it and use it in CI? Is there a technical challenge to doing that? Perhaps I'm missing something.
- cle 7y agoThey're pretty hard to learn. Formal methods are relatively abstract and the feedback loop is a lot less obvious--in TLA+/PlusCal, you aren't writing instructions, you're defining state spaces and relationships between/across them. Since it's not something you generally use often, it also gets rusty quickly. In a lot of dev jobs, it's just not worth the cost.
- hwayne 7y agoMostly it's a lack of education and UI work. The Alloy IDE, for example, doesn't have line numbers. There's also no CLI for Alloy. That said, it's an excellent tool and I've found it very useful when doing formal models.