Curry On
Rome!
July 18-19th, 2016


Why Writing Correct Software Is Hard and Why Math (Alone) Won’t Help Us
Ron Pressler
Parallel Universe

@puniverseco

Abstract

The halting theorem is computer science’s first and best-known theorem, and probably its most fundamental, yet much of the work we programmers do is try to escape its consequences. In fact, some are even convinced that its implications on real-world software are either slight or could be avoided altogether. This talk will explore the halting theorem and its finite variants, and show how it is inseparable from the very essence of computing and has an enormous implication on real software. We will ask exactly how hard it is to write correct software, and use computational complexity to answer that it is the hardest problem in all of computer science and cannot possibly be circumvented even if we try to forgo Turing completeness. An understanding of what computation means leads to the conclusion that computation and correctness are fundamentally, essentially and forever at odds. These ideas will take us from computer science to philosophy and even to politics. We will then survey the fascinating field of software verification. I’ll present principles that tie deductive proofs, model checking, abstract interpretation and type systems together, and present computational complexity results that impact them. In particular, we’ll see how we can use nothing but the halting theorem to compute the computational complexity bounds of type inference algorithms based on the strength of the type system, and show why approaches like total functional programming can do little to make correctness easier. The talk will end on a positive note, showing the only viable way towards correct software, one that can only be traveled if academia and industry work hand-in-hand. No background is required other than an introductory familiarity with basic computer science.

Bio

Ron Pressler is the founder of Parallel Universe, a company building a JVM-based server-side stack for easily writing high-performance, low latency applications that work in harmony with modern hardware architecture rather than fight it. In the past year, he has been working on formally verifying complex distributed algorithms.