I don't think the OP dismisses formal methods, only the idea that they have pervasive utility that outweighs costs in most scenarios, at least for certain kinds of formal methods.
But we can't forget the range of formal methods either. Type systems technically qualify, as the article notes, even if they are lightweight, and they're not new. Given the pervasiveness of Java, we're already making widespread use of at least that formal method and have been for a long time.
> How much revenue something generates is a poor metric. Otherwise, we all would probably be programming in PHP.
The OP wasn't arguing that revenue is driving or should drive language selection, only that the revenue shows that the lack of formal methods does not seems to prevent companies from making enormous sums of money.
> you can't just dismiss formal methods because we don't know how much development and maintenance overhead they would eliminate.
That by itself is not much of a positive argument for their use. And do you know how much maintenance overhead they would introduce? In either case, it might be useful to compare how a switch between similar languages (e.g. JS and Typescript) affected code quality (in terms of the number of bug reports filed, for example) and feature delivery time. Maybe there's a point where the trade off makes sense. In which case, languages that support a gradual adoption of formal methods might begin to look attractive.
But we can't forget the range of formal methods either. Type systems technically qualify, as the article notes, even if they are lightweight, and they're not new. Given the pervasiveness of Java, we're already making widespread use of at least that formal method and have been for a long time.
> How much revenue something generates is a poor metric. Otherwise, we all would probably be programming in PHP.
The OP wasn't arguing that revenue is driving or should drive language selection, only that the revenue shows that the lack of formal methods does not seems to prevent companies from making enormous sums of money.
> you can't just dismiss formal methods because we don't know how much development and maintenance overhead they would eliminate.
That by itself is not much of a positive argument for their use. And do you know how much maintenance overhead they would introduce? In either case, it might be useful to compare how a switch between similar languages (e.g. JS and Typescript) affected code quality (in terms of the number of bug reports filed, for example) and feature delivery time. Maybe there's a point where the trade off makes sense. In which case, languages that support a gradual adoption of formal methods might begin to look attractive.