In particular: ...[he's] welcome to keep shouting that tools won’t help, better languages won’t help, better process won’t help, the only thing that’ll help is lots and lots of unit tests. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to struggle with our bugs, curse our model checkers, and make software engineering just a little bit better. We don’t believe in silver bullets.
Again, your second paragraph already kind of agrees with this point, but the brilliant rhetoric in the essay is actually true: "no silver bullets" is a reason for, not against, the use of formal methods (and any other quality assurance mechanism we can get!)
> adding a layer of additional effort like Formal Methods necessarily either (a) increases development time significantly or (b) exponentially increases headcount.
It really depends. Especially in the case of formal methods for specification (as opposed to implementation formal methods), formal methods can save substantial amounts of time and manpower. And there are already a lot of success stories, and not just in safety-critical industries.
Your second paragraph kind of walks back on this, but I think it's still worth linking to this essay:
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/uncle-bob/
In particular: ...[he's] welcome to keep shouting that tools won’t help, better languages won’t help, better process won’t help, the only thing that’ll help is lots and lots of unit tests. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to struggle with our bugs, curse our model checkers, and make software engineering just a little bit better. We don’t believe in silver bullets.
Again, your second paragraph already kind of agrees with this point, but the brilliant rhetoric in the essay is actually true: "no silver bullets" is a reason for, not against, the use of formal methods (and any other quality assurance mechanism we can get!)
> adding a layer of additional effort like Formal Methods necessarily either (a) increases development time significantly or (b) exponentially increases headcount.
It really depends. Especially in the case of formal methods for specification (as opposed to implementation formal methods), formal methods can save substantial amounts of time and manpower. And there are already a lot of success stories, and not just in safety-critical industries.