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

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.

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

Nah, jump straight to pi-calculus.

See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287718

With link to pdf, github

You can be bad at writing with or without AI.

If the author threw this into Claude to add some load-bearing similes to their unedited monologue, it would only make it more insufferable to anyone complaining about it now.

Yep. Unreadable

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?

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

It takes about 5 seconds to open Wikipedia and type "TLA+".

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

Which is ironic and funny given the other common use of those letters.

The header is buggy.

most annoying post I've read

the jump from reading examples to writing a useful invariant is still the hard part

I did a lot of distsys work With tla+. I still think it’s the best use. It’s really hard to make sure your code matches what you prove.

I can’t understand any of this. It’s saying everything and nothing at the same time. Whatever TLA+ is this article makes it sound like the most tedious and academic thing ever.

the secret's out, but I think I'm still in a minority which has alloy models in addition to TLA+ ones

If the article's author's writing is this bad, imagine how they write software... shudder.