The internet discovers TLA+. Now what?

(reasonable.io)

30 points | by matt_d 7 hours ago ago

16 comments

  • stroebs 17 minutes ago

    17 mentions of “TLA+” before defining the acronym.

  • bsenftner an hour ago

    Took 10 minutes to find this: TLA+ is a formal specification language developed to design, model, document, and verify reactive systems.

    • noosphr an hour ago

      TLA+ is what unit testing looks like when a mathematician designs it.

  • stevefan1999 an hour ago

    I indirectly use TLA+ through https://github.com/quint-co/quint. I added instructions that "before you implement any feature, please use Quint to model it and make sure no counterexample for the system as a whole, reiterate the design with Quint as well and make sure your documents and implementation follows the formal model and docs".

    The result, while takes much longer, is quite magical. A lot of transaction and atomic bugs were found and fixed just by having such simple instruction alone.

    However, sometimes it is not all magical especially around external resources. Cloudflare, unfortunately, sometimes have hiccups on D1 and KV with timeout, which is more or less a force majeure.

    Fortunately, that means I will have to model the action as a binary event, that the transaction may not complete as we would have thought guaranteed, and by add extra guard around it, so that the state would have to be retried.

    I was able to workaround it like that so far. Keep in mind the more conditions and constraints, the beefier your CPU might need since it is on the scale of NP

  • peterus 2 hours ago

    Real world applications of TLA+: https://foundation.tlapl.us/industry/index.html.

    The Intel paper shows how TLA+ was applied as a step prior to writing the hardware description. I'm not sure if it caught on, it seems like other tools are used nowdays, does anyone here in the VLSI industry know?

  • scrubs 2 hours ago
  • lisp2240 2 hours ago

    Take a writing class. This was painful to read.

    • rsrsrs86 28 minutes ago

      Yep. Unreadable

    • pelagicAustral 2 hours ago

      Hahaha this is so funny... people here get slammed all the time of using AI for writing and here be, just someone writing his way through Internet history and gets slammed for it just the same... you can't hardly win with an audience like this... haha

      • cryptonym an hour ago

        You can be bad at writing with or without AI.

  • fizlebit 4 hours ago

    Time to discover communicating sequential processes instead :P

    • Yoric 2 hours ago

      Nah, jump straight to pi-calculus.

    • usrnm 3 hours ago

      That stuff gets rediscovered all the time, the latest example probably being golang

    • miranaproarrow 3 hours ago

      wait this is new to me so is this like a different kind of tla?

      • als0 3 hours ago

        I've always thought CSP as a robust design pattern where you have no shared state between components and they must communicate with each other using message passing. It also requires synchronous communication (rendezvous-style). If you follow those rules you can have a pretty robust system. Aside from these abstract rules, CSP has more formal research (algebra) but I'm not sure if there are any decent tools available.

        TLA gives you a full toolbox and in theory can model whatever you can express. That's very different from a design pattern.

    • azaras 3 hours ago

      I am learning TLA+ but I do not know CSP, is CSP better?