coq VS CppCoreGuidelines

The page summarizing the considered new names and their pros/cons is interesting: https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names

Naming is hard...

Are those more important than, say:

- Proven with Coq, a formal proof management system: https://coq.inria.fr/

See in the real world: https://aws.amazon.com/security/provable-security/

And check out Computer-Aided Verification (CAV).

To be ruthlessly, uselessly pedantic - after all, we're mathematicians - there's reasonable definitions of "academic" where logical unsoundness is still academic if it never interfered with the reasoning behind any proofs of interest ;)

But: so long as we're accepting that unsoundness in your checker or its underlying theory are intrinsically deal breakers, there's definitely a long history of this, perhaps more somewhat more relevant than the HM example, since no proof checkers of note, AFAIK, have incorporated mutation into their type theory.

For one thing, the implementation can very easily have bugs. Coq itself certainly has had soundness bugs occasionally [0]. I'm sure Agda, Lean, Idris, etc. have too, but I've followed them less closely.

But even the underlying mathematics have been tricky. Girard's Paradox broke Martin-Löf's type theory, which is why in these dependently typed proof assistants you have to deal with the bizarre "Tower of Universes"; and Girard's Paradox is an analogue of Russell's Paradox which broke more naive set theories. And then Russell himself and his system of universal mathematics was very famously struck down by Gödel.

But we've definitely gotten it right this time...

[0] https://github.com/coq/coq/issues/4294

Dafny and Whiley are two examples with explicit verification support. Idris and other dependently typed languages should all be rich enough to express the required predicate but might not necessarily be able to accept a reasonable implementation as proof. Isabelle, Lean, Coq, and other theorem provers definitely can express the capability but aren't going to churn out much in the way of executable programs; they're more useful to guide an implementation in a more practical functional language but then the proof is separated from the implementation, and you could also use tools like TLA+.

https://dafny.org/

https://whiley.org/

https://www.idris-lang.org/

https://isabelle.in.tum.de/

https://leanprover.github.io/

https://coq.inria.fr/

http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html

Still, there are many useful tools based on these ideas, used by programmers and mathematicians alike. What you describe sounds rather like Datalog (e.g. Soufflé Datalog), where you supply some rules and an initial fact, and the system repeatedly expands out the set of facts until nothing new can be derived. (This has to be finite, if you want to get anywhere.) In Prolog (e.g. SWI Prolog) you also supply a set of rules and facts, but instead of a fact as your starting point, you give a query containing some unknown variables, and the system tries to find an assignment of the variables that proves the query. And finally there is a rich array of theorem provers and proof assistants such as Agda, Coq, Lean, and Twelf, which can all be used to help check your reasoning or explore new ideas.

What ever happened to the effort [1] to rename Coq in order to make it less offensive? There were a number of excellent proposals [2] that seemed to die on the vine.

[1] https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names

[2] https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names#c%E1%B5%A3...

Information about the Coq proof assistant: https://coq.inria.fr/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq

This type of thing can help you formally verify code.

So, if your proof is correct, and your description of the (language/CPU) is correct, you can prove the code does what you think it does.

Formal proof systems are still growing up, though, and they are still pretty hard to use. See Coq for an introduction: https://coq.inria.fr/

Most of the proof assistants out there: Lean, Coq, Dafny, Isabelle, F*, Idris 2, and Agda. And the main concepts are dependent types, Homotopy Type Theory AKA HoTT, and Category Theory. Warning: HoTT and Category Theory are really dense, you're going to really need to research them.

You need to talk to Bjarne and Herb...

"C++ Core Guidelines" - https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines

In addition to the other comments -

TypeScript deliberately takes a "good enough" approach to improving JavaScript, instead of designing an ideal but incompatible approach. For example, its handling of [function parameter bivariance](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type-compatibil...) is unsound but works much better with the existing JavaScript ecosystem. By contrast, a more academic functional programming language would guarantee a sound type system but would be a huge shift from JavaScript.

By analogy, Herb Sutter is arguing that something like the [C++ Core Guidelines](https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines), with tooling help in this new Cpp2 syntax, can bring real improvements to safety. Something like Rust's borrow checker would bring much stricter guarantees, backed by academic research and careful design, but would be incompatible and a huge adjustment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2olsGf6JIkU

Take a look at Effective Modern c++ by Scott Meyers and the ISO c++ core guidelines. These resources are great for learning how to write better, more modern C++. I don't think it would be hard to grasp if you're already familiar with the language, just make sure to actually write some code which makes use of this stuff, otherwise it's easy to forget.

Look to the C++ Core Guidelines. It's not perfect, it has some flaws, including some sabotaging advice apparently adopted for political reasons. But at least it has some C++ authorities (Bjarne and Herb) as authors.