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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

You could, but your typical research scientist in biology will not even be aware of what formally verified software is, and even if it remains to be seen if there is such a thing for their particular application.

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There's also the issue of cost, which can go up real quick in some fields.

It can be hard to justify expensive software which might not always be able to accomplish whatever you're aiming to do.

Too bad there's no money in pharma and medical research in general.

There is plenty of money for marketing. Research is a distant second as you probably well know given your nickname and if someone put their study on hold for a half decade or so just to make sure that the software they use is properly put together the funding would evaporate rapidly for that particular team or individual.

Let's institute a ban on pharma ads, at least the ones that disclaim "don't take $NEWDRUG if you're allergic to $NEWDRUG," and give the money to research.

As a physicist who worked in Biology for a while, money didn't always make things better and sometimes made it worse. Programs with slick user interfaces tended to be overwhelmingly chosen over better open source programs which were command line. In bioinformatics a lot of excellent software is open source and updated regularly. In contrast, closed source software could be nightmarishly opaque in how it handled the data. Also, companies had better salespeople than open source proponents. Graduate students used to take bets about whether a software would be purchased by looking at how hot the salesperson was.

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