Comment by esperent
9 hours ago
I absolutely called this a couple of weeks ago, nice to be vindicated!
> I'm interested to see what it is in the age of LLMs or similar future tools. I suspect a future phase change might be towards disregarding how easy it is for humans to work with the code and instead focus on provability, testing, perhaps combined with token efficiency.
> Maybe Lean combined with Rust shrunk down to something that is very compiler friendly. Imagine if you could specify what you need in high level language and instead of getting back "vibe code", you get back proven correct code, because that's the only kind of code that will successfully compile.
It's important to keep in mind that no proof system ensures your proof is the correct proof, only that it's a valid proof. Completely understanding what a proof proves is often nearly as difficult as understanding the program it's proving. Normally you benefit because the process of building a proof forces you to develop your understanding more fully.
Uhm, no? Even with "simple" examples like Dijkstra's shortest path, the spec is easier than the implementation. Maybe not for you, but try it out on an arbitrary 5-yr old. On the extreme end, you have results in maths, like Fermat's Last Theorem. Every teenager can understand the statement (certainly after 10 mins of explanation) but the proof is thousands of pages of super-specialized maths. It is a spectrum. For cryptography, compression, error-correction, databases, etc, the spec is often much simpler than the implementation.
I don't know why you created a new account for this, but take the textbook example of a nontrivial formally verified system: SeL4. That implementation was 8.7k of C code, which correspondend to 15k lines of Isabelle that ultimately needed 100k+ lines of proof to satisfy. And that was with the formal model excluding lots of important properties like hardware failure that actual systems deal with.