On 11 Jan 2008, at 14:07, Levi Pearson wrote:
If you look at the history of CS, you'll see that early on, people like Knuth and Dijkstra worked very hard to formally verify things. Later on, however, as the complexity of software systems grew, formal methods fell into disfavor because they didn't scale very well. Many people wrote them off completely. I've heard quite a few college professors badmouthing formal methods. But there are still some people working on them, and there are tools being developed that significantly reduce the difficulties involved. Most of the work goes on in research labs, universities, and in the government/military embedded software community, since that's where reliability is most crucial and where there's money to pay for it.
That is also where there is more time and emphasis put on doing it "the right way" instead of in the work force where the emphasis is on getting it done and out the door so that you can start on the next project and bring in more money.
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