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goostavosyesterday at 6:42 PM1 replyview on HN

I find the same. Even those who are interested in it in theory hit a pretty unforgiving wall when they try to put it in practice. Learning TLA+ is way harder than leaning another programming language. I failed repeatedly while trying to "program" via PlusCal. To use TLA you have to (re)learn some high-school math and you have to learn to use that math to think abstractly. It takes time and a lot (a lot!) of effort.

Now is a great time to dive in, though. LLMs take a lot of the syntactical pain out of the learning experience. Hallucinations are annoying, but you can formally prove they're wrong with the model checker ^_^

I think it's going to be a learn these tools or fall behind thing in the age of AI.


Replies

hwayneyesterday at 9:27 PM

I think the "high school math" slogan is untrue and ultimately scares people away from TLA+, by making it sound like it's their fault for not understanding a tough tool. I don't think you could show an AP calculus student the equation `<>[](ENABLED <<A>>_v) => []<><<A>>_v` and have them immediately go "ah yes, I understand how that's only weak fairness"