Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?
Contact via Email Open Github account in new tab Posted on Jan 21, 2019 I saw this question on the Software Engineering Stack Exchange: What are the barriers that prevent widespread adoption of formal methods? The question was closed as opinion-based, and most of the answers were things like “its too expensive!!!” or “website isn’t airplane!!!” These are sorta kinda true but don’t explain very much. I wrote this to provide a larger historical picture of formal methods, why they’re actually so unused, and what we’re doing to make them used.
- ▪Contact via Email Open Github account in new tab Posted on Jan 21, 2019 I saw this question on the Software Engineering Stack Exchange: What are the barriers that prevent widespread adoption of formal methods?
- ▪The question was closed as opinion-based, and most of the answers were things like “its too expensive!!!” or “website isn’t airplane!!!” These are sorta kinda true but don’t explain very much.
- ▪I wrote this to provide a larger historical picture of formal methods, why they’re actually so unused, and what we’re doing to make them used.
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| Original publisher | Hillel Wayne |
| Canonical URL | https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/why-dont-people-use-formal-methods/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 30 Jul 2026 12:21:34 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-30T14:22:07.997Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-30T14:22:07.997Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | vX4gU4ma2vXB · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Why Don't People Use Formal Methods? Contact via Email Open Github account in new tab Posted on Jan 21, 2019 I saw this question on the Software Engineering Stack Exchange: What are the barriers that prevent widespread adoption of formal methods? The question was closed as opinion-based, and most of the answers were things like “its too expensive!!!” or “website isn’t airplane!!!” These are sorta kinda true but don’t explain very much. I wrote this to provide a larger historical picture of formal methods, why they’re actually so unused, and what we’re doing to make them used. Before we begin, we need to lay down some terms. There really isn’t a formal methods community so much as a few tiny bands foraging in the Steppe.1 This means different groups use terms in different ways.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hillel Wayne.
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