On the heroism of really pursuing formal methods: title inspired by Dijkstra's "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computing Science"
Dino Mandrioli · Formal Methods · 2015
Formal methods have been preached as a means to achieve better reliability and other qualities in software and systems for half a century. Despite many success stories confirmed their effectiveness, there is still much reluctance (not only) in the industrial world to apply them on a large scale. In this paper I add my modest personal view to the rich and longstanding debate on the reasons of this apparent failure; I examine the main challenges to face and the most promising symptoms to hope into an improved state of the affairs.