[posterboy]

> > As far as I remember attempts to use proofs in production were counter productive

Wait, does that mean in development? Otherwise, as I understood production so far it would be dependent typing. Supposedly that infers and automates a lot of otherwise handwritten safety checks.

> You remember incorrectly.

Indeed, Test Driven Development is huge and it's not even really formal. Formalisms should facilitate it a lot.

[hyperpape]

At some level of abstraction, types of any kind are already proofs, and they're tremendously important in many actual existing languages.

What you're probably glomming on to is that efforts to push the bounds of what you can prove (higher kinded or dependent types) have had mixed results (mixed in the sense that some people think they're great, others are unconvinced).

So we're in a weird situation where many many people are using a tool, but relatively few are interested in new developments concerning how to use that tool.

[throwaway729]

> Wait, does that mean in development?

I think xchaotic probably meant "in development of production code", and is wrong for two reasons:

1. Compilers are production code, and the research agenda this post describes informs a lot of that code (by way of language design). Unverified compilers still make a lot of use of underlying theory.

2. Correctness proofs and static analyses, which are both deeply related but different from what's being described in this post, are used in production environments every day.