← Back to context

Comment by alexpotato

10 hours ago

I was reading about Tao's efforts to get more people to use Lean and apparently a big roadblock for people is that Lean uses very specific static typing.

e.g. to use a very simple example on a white board "3" is "overloaded" as:

- the integer 3

- the rational number 3

- the whole number 3

- etc

When you write a proof in Lean, you have to specify the the type of "3" you mean.

Having using Python/Perl and Java over the years, I get that some math folks found handling this daunting or at a minimum friction to getting into using Lean.

LLMs seem to have been a big help here just for the "translate my math notation into a proof" feature.

To get the hang of this, I used Leanstral (Mistral’s LEAN agent) to vibe-code things like “the game of bridge” and then read the LEAN code.