The FRP capabilities mentioned look impressive. Interesting also that Whiley is used for teaching – have students been receptive to learning and working with a niche language?
I remember finding the Whiley development blog a while back and appreciating how it doesn’t shy away from the uncertainty in language design.
Well, given the contexts in which we’ve used Whiley (i.e. for teaching about specification and formal methods) then it makes sense to students. A while back we had a 2nd year course with 200 odd students simply called “software correctness” which covered a whole bunch of stuff. It worked great at that level, though the course was eventually cancelled for lots of exciting reasons. They do get frustrated when things don’t work properly, or have weird behaviour. We also use it now in a 3rd year safety critical systems course, where we had been using Alloy before. Students struggled with Alloy to be honest, and Whiley is more like a programming language they know.
The FRP capabilities mentioned look impressive. Interesting also that Whiley is used for teaching – have students been receptive to learning and working with a niche language?
I remember finding the Whiley development blog a while back and appreciating how it doesn’t shy away from the uncertainty in language design.
Hey,
Well, given the contexts in which we’ve used Whiley (i.e. for teaching about specification and formal methods) then it makes sense to students. A while back we had a 2nd year course with 200 odd students simply called “software correctness” which covered a whole bunch of stuff. It worked great at that level, though the course was eventually cancelled for lots of exciting reasons. They do get frustrated when things don’t work properly, or have weird behaviour. We also use it now in a 3rd year safety critical systems course, where we had been using Alloy before. Students struggled with Alloy to be honest, and Whiley is more like a programming language they know.