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Are There Any Provable

Real-World Languages?

or, Why Do Our Bridges Keep Falling Down?

Tristram Oaten

0atman.com

Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wscullin/3770015203

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“I'm not sure whether what you ask for

is actually what will make you happy”

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credit: mrp@ecs.soton.ac.uk, modified by me

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https://www.flickr.com/photos/brad_wang/8369501880

Lets rewind a bit:

Software development is a rapidly evolving field that got off to a very rocky start.
Conventional wisdom for many years was that software engineering should be like other types of engineering: design carefully, specify precisely, and then just build it – exactly to spec. Just like building a bridge, right?
The problem with this approach is that software is just that. Soft. It’s endlessly malleable. You can change software pretty much any time you want, and people do.
Since software can be used to model just about anything, the possibilities for what you can ask software developers to do are pretty much infinite.

Want to simulate a circuit in software?
Go ahead.
Run a bank?
No problem.
Connect half a billion people to their friends?
Why not, piece of cake.

(source http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2011/06/07/whats-your-start-up-bus-count-7-myths-of-entrepreneurship-and-programming/)

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The Oregon Experiment, Christopher Alexander

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http://xkcd.com/327/

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Good

Fast

Cheap

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Can we make web coding

less famously sloppy?

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The Kirkaldy Testing Works

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An Anecdote:

Ubuntu.com Download day

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The solutions ARE here

But they are not evenly distributed

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http://www.scala-lang.org/old/node/131

error: in XML literal: expected closing tag of head

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https://wiki.haskell.org/Introduction_to_QuickCheck1

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http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/

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http://proofpad.org/

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The need is clear,

the impetus is lacking

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Discussion/thoughts?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/purecaffeine/4325390829