Software Correctness & Supply Chain Security: A Conversation with Sean Allen

The Pragmatic Engineer interviews Sean Allen, a distinguished engineer at Antithesis and core contributor to the Pony language, on software correctness and supply chain security. Allen argues that strong type systems in the ML language family catch more errors at compile time than ALGOL-family languages, and that manual testing is the worst way to ensure correctness. He also says supply chain attacks have no single simple fix, since robustly defended languages like 'E' are unpopular while popular languages assume a trustworthy ecosystem.