To Konrad Hinsen: you HERO.

On Thu, 26 Jan 2023 at 02:40, Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hin...@fastmail.net>
wrote:

> "Richard O'Keefe" <rao...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Thus I hypothesise that there is room for Smalltalk as a tool for
> > *generating* and configuring HPC code.
>
> Yes. But it will be hard to convince people that Smalltalk is a better
> choice than Python (well established in HPC as you say) for this use
> case.
>
> > My main worry is that when it comes to "bet your whole economy"
> > software and worse still, "bet the entire global economy and human
> > happiness for centuries" software like climate models, it's
> > appropriate to use the very highest quality assurance tools practical,
> > including *serious* verification.  That's not common practice.
>
> Indeed, and that's one of my main worries in computational science as
> well. There is a culture of scientific validation, but not of technical
> verification of artifacts such as code.
>
> My own project in this space (implemented in Pharo) aims at supporting
> *human* verification for the aspects that no automatic tool can possibly
> verify. In technical terms, that's verifying the formal specification
> rather than the implementation of some method. The first step, which I
> have made good progress on, is a specification language for scientific
> models and methods that human readers would be happy to proofread.
> Details:
>
>    https://github.com/khinsen/leibniz-pharo/
>    https://science-in-the-digital-era.khinsen.net/#Leibniz
>
> Konrad
>

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