On the Heroism of really Pursuing Formal Methods

Formal methods have been “preached” as a means to achieve better reliability and other qualities in software and systems for half a century. Despite many success stories confirmed their effectiveness, there is still much reluctance (not only) in the industrial world to apply them on a large scale. In this paper I add my modest personal view to the rich and long- standing debate on the reasons of this apparent failure; I examine the main challenges to face and the most promising symptoms to hope into an improved state of the affairs.