My practitioner view of program analysis | Hacker News Reader

My practitioner view of program analysis

sawyer.dev

49 pointsevakhoury7 comments

The gap between formal and informal has been pointed out as an Achilles' heel of formal methods from the dawn of the field, so critique is not particularly new. The standard reference is Social processes and proofs of theorems and programs (1979), which is worth reading.

Nice; thanks for the pointer to the paper (i had not known of it).

The key to understanding and usage of Formal Methods is to realize that it is a way of thinking at many different levels. You can choose whatever level seems intuitive and accessible to you.

The must-read paper On Formal Methods Thinking in Computer Science Education posits three levels which i have highlighted here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46298961

Carroll Morgan's classic (In-)Formal Methods: The Lost Art --- A Users’ Manual and his recent book on the same are also relevant here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490017

There are ways to partially improve or at least quantify the specification gap using LLMs, by analyzing variance in the output formal specification when given a natural language specification (by eg. generating many formal specs from an input description).

See eg. "Draft-and-Prune: Improving the Reliability of Auto-formalization for Logical Reasoning" [1].

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17233

the author seems unaware of the SAT/SMT solver/analysis ecosystem

Why do you think so? I didn't get such impression.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No. Did you even read the article? It talks about the "specification gap", which is the difference between the formalized semantics and the intended semantics.

Every formal method has that problem (including the mentioned trivial ones like SAT and SMT).

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