Users are Nondeterministic Agents of Chaos

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2021-06-08 08:00:07

I shared an early version with the newsletter some time back, and now the final version is done! This one is less technical than usual, just me trying to articulate a difference between different classes of “cleverness” in programming. I think lumping them all under the same brush does us a disservice, and I figure calling out the differences can lead other people to do more interesting stuff with the division. Enjoy the blog!

Putting what I consider my best work in one place. Right now contains my formal methods teaching and research projects, like the Crossover project. That way people can find it without having to archive dive my blog.

Work on Predicate Logic for Programmers continues. I’m tentatively considering three “main areas” of application:

(2) is really interesting. What makes specifying requirements different from specifying functions? One obvious difference is scope: you can’t write a total specification for requirements the same way you can for functions, you can only do partial specifications. A subtler—but more impactful—difference is that requirements are much more about user interaction than functions are. We don’t just care that there’s one function that’s correct, but that there’s a range of things the user can do, and in aggregate they are all correct.