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Yoriclast Monday at 11:56 PM1 replyview on HN

Note that in the case of coding, there is an entire branch of computer science dedicated to verification.

All the type systems (and model-checkers) for Rust, Ada, OCaml, Haskell, TypeScript, Python, C#, Java, ... are based on such research, and these are all rather weak in comparison to what research has created in the last ~30 years (see Rocq, Idris, Lean).

This goes beyond that, as some of these mechanisms have been applied to mathematics, but also to some aspects of finance and law (I know of at least mechanisms to prove formally implementations of banking contracts and tax management).

So there is lots to do in the domain. Sadly, as every branch of CS other than AI (and in fact pretty much every branch of science other than AI), this branch of computer science is underfunded. But that can change!


Replies

charcircuitlast Tuesday at 2:28 AM

Considering how useful I've found AI at finding and fixing bugs proportional to the effort I put in, I question your claim that it's being underfunded. While I have learned things like Idris, in the end I never was able to practically use them to reduce bugs in the software I was writing unlike AI. It's possible that the funding towards these types of languages is actually distracting people from more practical solutions which could actually mean that it is overfunded in regards to program verification.