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spinningslate | 1 year ago
1. "It's not visual, it's text". Yeah, but: how many "visual" representations have no text? And there _are_ visuals in there: the depictions of state space. They include text (hard to see how they'd be useful without) but aren't solely so.
2. "Meh, verification is for well paid academics, it's not for the real world". First off, I doubt those "academics" are earning more than median sw devs, never mind those in the SV bubble. More importantly: there are well-publicised examples of formal verification being used for real-world code, see e.g. [1].
It's certainly true that verification isn't widespread. It has various barriers, from use of formal maths theory and presentation to the compute load arising from combinatorial explosion of the state space. Even if you don't formally verify, understanding the state space size and non-deterministic path execution of concurrent code is fundamentally important. As Dijkstra said [2]:
> our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualise processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static process and the dynamic program, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.
He was talking about sequential programming: specifically, motivating the use of structured programming. It's equally applicable to concurrent programming though.
[1]: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lc-verification
[2]: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p...
CyberDildonics|1 year ago
What does this mean and how does it excuse a 'visual' article being all text?
I doubt those "academics" are earning more than median sw devs
Do you think the point might have been more about the pragmatism of formal verification?