[DR] I would say that the biggest weak point in our curriculum, the promise of the 20th century that we have not fully fulfilled, is applied formal methods. We set a good foundation with SE212, but then we don't follow-through strongly enough. They do see a bit of math used in design in SE380 Controls and CS348 Databases. But industry has actually (a bit) moved ahead of undergraduate education in the application of formal methods at AWS and other venues.
[JA] With respect to FM use in industry — keep in mind that the “practitioners” at AWS, Apple, MS, etc. all have PhDs and many of them are research stars. I’m not sure that we can say that undergraduate education has not kept up with industrial application of FM.
[DR] Yes, it's a bit unreasonable to say that undergraduate education has not kept up with industry here. But we could say that this is as yet a not fully realized dream, but one in which there is more potential to do now than before, because of the great advances in tooling over the last twenty years.
[PL] There's always a lag between when something is research and when something is practice. It could be that FM is following this path. It is too early to say for sure. There are certainly individual data points. I think that TLA+ is not just used by research stars anymore. And Hillel Wayne is trying to make a living out of Alloy education / consulting.
Twitter thread on big-up-front-design: