Which project did you work on that made specs that good? I sure haven’t (but I am sure they exist).
replyIn one case I formalized the spec for a message decoder, then autonomously generated the entire decoder from that. The spec is essentially a very slow version of the decoder written for correctness and clarity, and the implementation became very complex as it went through multiple optimizations, but it was proved every step of the way to match the original spec.
replyWhat project is closest to doing this today?
reply> You'd basically "program" and "debug" the spec
replySweet, we could even develop a standard language(s) to lay out such specs, and write in specialised text editors that would help with debugging. Hell we could even call it ‘programming’
Correct -- this is exactly where the frontier is heading at the startups and AI labs working on this.
replyWhile you're being tongue in cheek, what you're missing is that the spec you'd be working on in some cases can be compressed to a small fraction the size of the implementation code. Alternatively, it can be written for clarity and correctness rather than performance, and then the implementation can be optimized like crazy without ever worrying about correctness.