I remember this from a Leslie Lamport talk posted also on HN a few months ago. Is anyone using this for specifications, prototyping or anything in between in real life?
It was the first time he'd used TLA+ (or TLA) at all, and it took a bit of experimenting to get used to it, but he soon generated a solid logical model and exposed a number of fringe flaws in the original proposed solution.
From TLA+ model to completed Java application took very little time at all, the logic was all there already, it just needed fleshed out in the language. It was also easy to split the work out amongst multiple programmers. He's argued that the total time, including learning TLA+, took less time than writing the application from scratch in Java and discovering the bugs as they went along.
About the only thing he disliked with it was that almost all (if not all) the tooling around it require Eclipse, and he hates that IDE with an almost unholy passion :D
This is nothing to do with you or your statement, but this is the pre-eminent issue in our industry. Everything absolutely has to be logically correct or we expose users to flaws in both security and stability that can in extreme cases be the difference between life or death and in regular cases be the difference between being cracked or not.
Best to keep it real about risks so your solutions match requirements. Most companies are happy to sell patches to broken software or offer software that passed many checklist items for compliance. They have lawyers for the rest.
Hence calling it an extreme case.
> Hacks happen by the millions with headaches being the main result along with lost time and money.
...which is a good reason to make software correct.
However, I'm not arguing about the ROI and efficiency of attaining absolute correctness; my point is that software should be correct. Ideally.
We're happy to settle for somewhere on the low side of correctness, but I don't think that is necessarily healthy or good for the industry.
And the satisfied customer effect can't be ignored. ;)
It does seem like online gaming companies are at the forefront of distributed systems implementation. See League of Legends' use of conflict-free replicated data types, for example: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/10/13/how-league-of-leg...
If anyone is interested and the original article (mentioned elsewhere) as PDF: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/tla/fo...