Re: [Proposal] The Formal Methods in GNU Guix Working Group

[Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org>]

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Hello Guix!

Thank you Brett for taking initiative and putting this awesome proposal
together on all our behalves, and to everyone else for chiming in and
expressing your interest and support!

To share some of my (scattered) thoughts on this, as a researcher I
think reproducible and verifiable research is a crucially important
topic, yet traditionally and often a neglected one.  Throughout my
graduate studies, too many times I stumbled on papers with interesting
claims that I sadly could not reproduce or easily verify for myself.
And I think this is especially ironic and painful for those of us doing
research in formal methods, computing science, and software engineering;
and is where projects like GNU Guix with their awesome efforts in
reproducibility could act as role models and show what's possible.

For instance, for better or worse many of the tools I have worked with
over the last few years are primarily implemented in Java, often in form
Eclipse plugins.  Suffice to say that release management, bundling, and
distribution practices of most of these tools leave a lot to be desired.
As part of the Formal Methods in GNU Guix Working Group, I'd love for us
to try and get in touch with the developers of these tools and offer to
work with them to challenge and improve the status quo, resulting
ultimately in more readily and easily accessible tools, greatly useful
for verifying and reproducing existing literature.

As Brett and I alluded to, there's a large variety of tasks in all
shapes and sizes that could use your help, from more "researchy" work
like writing a bootstrapping SML '97 compiler, or exploring synthesis
and verification for GNU Guile and GNU Guix, to less researchy ones like
packaging (even more) formal methods-related software and helping their
developers improve their release and package qualities.

We would love to hear more from you about this in trying to gradually
put together actionable plans.  If you'd like to chat with us, please
come say hi to us in the #guix IRC channel on freenode.  My nick there
is bandali, and Brett is brettgilio.

Best,
amin

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