How many doctors in the field are practicing formal methods these days beyond say statistics?
Anyways, surely SE as a field benefits from formal methods like other fields, whether applied by specialists or in the field by practitioners we can debate, but hopefully we can all agree SE isn't defined as just applying formal methods, that there is a lot in development that will never go near a formal spec.
Doctors are required to have extensive knowledge of chemistry, physics, and biology before even beginning medical school. Those are all highly scientific fields with centuries of practice behind them, not to mention medicine itself which is nearly as old as people are.
Yes, but computer scientists are required to take engineering physics also, as well as creative writing sometime. We are talking about the practice of medicine, and if you know any doctors, they aren't exactly very interested in math (they have a lot of other stuff to do!).
Anyways, surely SE as a field benefits from formal methods like other fields, whether applied by specialists or in the field by practitioners we can debate, but hopefully we can all agree SE isn't defined as just applying formal methods, that there is a lot in development that will never go near a formal spec.