I didn't claim anywhere formal methods are worthless or have zero real world impact. I said that the dream of formalizing all reasoning turned out to be a pipe-dream, and it did, as in:
Is that superstition and folk science? I also don't see mathematicians using mathematical logic to prove theorems in "ordinary" mathematics, hence the comment about "business as usual". I know formal methods are an active research field and successfully used in specialized applications in CS, but the article we are commenting upon is claiming studying formal methods is the best way to learn programming, which is similar to saying learning mathematical logic is the best way to learn mathematics, which is non-sense as evidenced by the attempts to do this.
People are even making money using formal reasoning. So please, take time to learn more before disparaging entire fields.
Btw, I know about the incompleteness theorems. I teach a course centered around that.
Let me ask you a related question: do you stop programming because many of the tasks associated with programming are Turing-uncomputable? (checking if a program halts, checking if two programs compute the same function etc.)
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I didn't claim anywhere formal methods are worthless or have zero real world impact. I said that the dream of formalizing all reasoning turned out to be a pipe-dream, and it did, as in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_program#G.C3.B6del....
Is that superstition and folk science? I also don't see mathematicians using mathematical logic to prove theorems in "ordinary" mathematics, hence the comment about "business as usual". I know formal methods are an active research field and successfully used in specialized applications in CS, but the article we are commenting upon is claiming studying formal methods is the best way to learn programming, which is similar to saying learning mathematical logic is the best way to learn mathematics, which is non-sense as evidenced by the attempts to do this.
You don't know does not equal to that not existing.
http://www.cs.miami.edu/~tptp/OverviewOfATP.html
People are even making money using formal reasoning. So please, take time to learn more before disparaging entire fields.
Btw, I know about the incompleteness theorems. I teach a course centered around that.
Let me ask you a related question: do you stop programming because many of the tasks associated with programming are Turing-uncomputable? (checking if a program halts, checking if two programs compute the same function etc.)