Hillel Wayne

@hillel-wayne · 45 positions · On ppll ↗

Writer and consultant on formal methods, testing and software correctness, author of Logic for Programmers and Practical TLA+. He ran the Crossover Project, interviewing seventeen people who worked as traditional engineers before becoming software developers, to settle by evidence whether software engineering is engineering.

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What Hillel Wayne says most about

formal proof 10

Formal methods shine in highly computational domains and struggle wherever the problem is embedded in human business behaviour.
Formal methods are not used everywhere because for most real problems writing down what the function should do is itself a nightmare, and a program that is right ninety-nine per cent of the time is good enough.

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software quality 6

Formal methods are a niche tool; property-based testing is the one most engineers should adopt, and stopping there is a fine place to stop.
Software is not less rigorous than traditional engineering; its record-keeping and automated verification are better than most of that field's.

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LLMs 3

To get good results out of an LLM you have to already know how to get them without it; the model only makes it faster.
The software job losses of the past few years were caused more by the end of zero-interest-rate money and the post-COVID crash than by AI.

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mathematics 3

Programmers fail to recognise how much mathematics their job uses because the mathematics it needs is discrete and school teaches the continuous kind.
Most mathematics will never be useful to a developer; what pays is knowing what mathematics exists so you can find the part that is.

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