Yes, with the current state of the art, adopting formal methods means adopting a radically different approach to software development. For 'rapid application development' work, it isn't going to be a good choice. It's only a real consideration if you're serious about developing ultra-low-defect software (to use a term from the AdaCore folks).
> it doesn't even eliminate bugs because the formal proof could include a bug too
This is rather dismissive. Formal methods have been successfully used in various life-critical software systems, such as medical equipment and avionics.
As I said above, formal methods can eliminate all 'runtime errors' (like out-of-bounds array access), and there's a lot of power in formally guaranteeing that the model's invariants are never broken.
> I suppose it could help in trivial cases like sanity checking that a value isn't null or that a lock is only held by a single thread
No, this doesn't accurately reflect how formal methods work. I suggest taking a look at the PDFs I linked above. For one thing, formal modelling is not done using a programming language.
Yes, with the current state of the art, adopting formal methods means adopting a radically different approach to software development. For 'rapid application development' work, it isn't going to be a good choice. It's only a real consideration if you're serious about developing ultra-low-defect software (to use a term from the AdaCore folks).
> it doesn't even eliminate bugs because the formal proof could include a bug too
This is rather dismissive. Formal methods have been successfully used in various life-critical software systems, such as medical equipment and avionics.
As I said above, formal methods can eliminate all 'runtime errors' (like out-of-bounds array access), and there's a lot of power in formally guaranteeing that the model's invariants are never broken.
> I suppose it could help in trivial cases like sanity checking that a value isn't null or that a lock is only held by a single thread
No, this doesn't accurately reflect how formal methods work. I suggest taking a look at the PDFs I linked above. For one thing, formal modelling is not done using a programming language.