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36 results for “ahelwer”
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I wrote a blog post about a type of TLA+ contract I've done a few times, why it never goes as well as hoped, and how future contracts could be restructured for greater success.
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Hillel Wayne had some ideas to make TLA+ syntax more familiar to software engineers (basically less LaTeX-y, like "all" instead of "\A"), so I branched the Java-based parser and whipped up some changes to see what this would look like in practice. It was very low effort but also totally works. Taking additional requests!
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I wrote a blog post version of my talk at the 2025 TLA⁺ Community Event last week. I try to capture the current state of TLA⁺ tooling development: what tools exist, our greatest challenges, and what I want in the near-mid future.
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The current state of TLA⁺ development
https://ahelwer.ca/post/2025-05-15-tla-dev-status/
#HackerNews #TLA+ #TLAplus #development #software #engineering #formal #methods #programming
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Let go of StackOverflow; communities must take ownership
https://ahelwer.ca/post/2025-11-25-stackoverflow/
#HackerNews #Let #go #of #StackOverflow #communities #must #take #ownership #ownership #of #knowledge #tech #communities
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🎉 Oh look, another article about the tragic demise of StackOverflow's glory days—because clearly, nothing screams relevance more than reminiscing about a website from the mid-2010s. 🚀 Spoiler: communities have already moved on, but hey, thanks for the history lesson, Andrew! 🙄
https://ahelwer.ca/post/2025-11-25-stackoverflow/ #StackOverflow #Nostalgia #TechCommunity #OnlineLearning #WebDevelopment #HistoryLesson #HackerNews #ngated -
Oh, look! Another riveting blog post about TLA⁺ development, because clearly the world was desperate for more updates on formal specification languages from 2025. 🎉🤖 Congratulations, Andrew, for making sure our excitement levels match those of a toaster's firmware update. 🍞🔧
https://ahelwer.ca/post/2025-05-15-tla-dev-status/ #TLAplus #TLAplusDevelopment #FormalSpecification #Humor #TechUpdates #HackerNews #ngated -
Lamport's new (and final) book A Science of Concurrent Programs is now officially published! The final draft PDF has long been available for free on Lamport's website, but now you can buy a hardcover from Cabridge press. Discussion on the TLA+ mailing list: https://discuss.tlapl.us/msg06762.html
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Spent a bit of time exercising my temporal logic/basic boolean algebra muscles today. Found a nice derivation, felt good!
https://groups.google.com/g/tlaplus/c/4hw3eUzDVA8/m/KKjzEAqOAQAJ
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Tuesday evening project: trying out the new #Arch Linux image for the #PineNote to try to build a distraction-free computing environment. Thesis: if it takes an hour to connect to wi-fi and another hour to connect it to a Bluetooth keyboard, I probably won’t use it to waste time scrolling. But I might use it to waste time formalizing math from a textbook!
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Learning fun things like that the TLA+ model checker call stack for evaluating a next state predicate goes:
ITool#getNextStates()
Tool#getNextStatesImpl()
Tool#getNextStatesAppl()
Tool#getNextStatesApplImpl()
Tool#getNextStatesApplImplSwitch() -
Today published the penultimate chapter of my how-to guide to building your own TLA+ model-checker, in which we actually do a breadth-first search over the state space to check safety properties! Only one chapter remains but it’s more of a clean-up topic. Maybe I should just cut it. I can’t imagine many people who actually work through this tutorial who would want to implement operator parameters as closures.
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August TLA⁺ dev update: GenAI challenge winners announced, a startup paying people to write TLA⁺ spec examples, and efforts to make the tools less file-dependent!
https://foundation.tlapl.us/blog/2025-08-dev-update/index.html
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Published the July 2025 TLA+ development update. GenAI challenge submission deadline passed, TLAPM updated to use Isabelle 2025, TLA+ proofs fixed, critical chapter published on guide to writing your own TLA+ modelchecker!
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Lately I've been mulling what exactly will keep TLA+ from going the way of UML in terms of relevance; turns out Hillel Wayne already wrote a pretty good post about that!
https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/can-formal-methods-succeed-where-uml-failed/
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June TLA⁺ development update: AI contest submission deadline is July 4th, Spectacle gets GraphViz animation support, VS Code extension gets MCP support, and a new research grant for synthesizing inductive invariants!
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Spamming TLA⁺ stuff today because I wanted to get that last post out before the publication date of this post: the May monthly development update! TLA⁺ Community Event talk recordings posted, a contest with a NVIDIA RTX 5090 as the grand prize, GraalVM native image builds, and a big focus on improving usability this month.
https://foundation.tlapl.us/blog/2025-05-dev-update/index.html
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Understandable & predictable performance has its benefits!
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CW: climbing accident (fatalities)
Wow. Really bad climbing accident out in Washington at the North Early Winters Spire, three people died when a rappel anchor failed and they all fell down a steep couloir. On the face of it, strikingly similar to the infamous Sharkfin Tower tragedy back in 2005 which also killed three people.
#Climbing #RockClimbing #Washington #Seattle #Mountaineering #Alpinism
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My talk from the TLA+ community conference has been posted! It's a not-very-technical talk where I go over what's happening in the TLA+ language tooling development space, what challenges we are facing in TLA+ development & how the TLA+ Foundation has been funding work to overcome them, and what I'd like to see come next for TLA+!
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Making a minimal TLA+ model checker for the “build your own TLA+” tutorial has been technically tricky, a puzzle with a lot of dead ends. If a model checker didn’t already exist I doubt I’d believe it possible. Admiration for Yuan Yu for writing one in the first place, back in the day.
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Back to work today. Finished a tutorial, this one a big one - parsing vertically-aligned conjunction & disjunction lists in TLA+! Not many people know how to do this, although anybody who's written a Python parser can probably guess how it's done.
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Does anybody know of a static site generator that statically compiles your math equations to MathML? Note this is different than MathJax or KaTeX or whatever other solution that I believe uses SVGs, rendered either on the backend or in the browser.
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Learned about rlwrap from the recent @b0rk post, which has made the OCaml REPL & debugger vastly nicer to use - in stock form it doesn't integrate GNU Readline, so you can't do nice things like use arrow keys for text navigation. On the other hand maybe this is against the spirit of GNU Readline, which was intended as a big carrot to get more software to be GPL. OCaml tooling is LGPL from what I can tell. Does anybody know more about the background here?
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New krazam just dropped https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia8Q51ouA_s
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Banging my head against a model checker error message, going as far as thinking there's a bug in TLC before realizing actually I had just assigned the same variable twice within the same action and the second assignment was being treated as a logical operation exposing a bug/type mismatch in the first
