It's a strange interpretation only if you focus on just the vocal minority that talks about formal requirements. Here are two quotes by Hillel Wayne (https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/why-dont-people-use-formal-...), whom I've found to have the most balanced take:
"The problem with finding the right spec is more fundamental: we often don’t know what we want the spec to be. We think of our requirements in human terms, not mathematical terms. If I say “this should distinguish parks from birds”, what am I saying? I could explain to a human by giving a bunch of pictures of parks and birds, but that’s just specific examples, not capturing the idea of distinguishing parks from birds. To actually translate that to a formal spec requires us to be able to formalize human concepts, and that is a serious challenge."
"It’s too expensive doing full verification in day-to-day programming. Instead of proving that my sort function always sorts, I can at least prove it doesn’t loop forever and never writes out of bounds. You can still get a lot of benefit out of this."
The post makes a strong case, IMO. Formal methods can be valuable, but they don't have the track record yet for anyone to believe they're the #1 essential thing about programming.
"The problem with finding the right spec is more fundamental: we often don’t know what we want the spec to be. We think of our requirements in human terms, not mathematical terms. If I say “this should distinguish parks from birds”, what am I saying? I could explain to a human by giving a bunch of pictures of parks and birds, but that’s just specific examples, not capturing the idea of distinguishing parks from birds. To actually translate that to a formal spec requires us to be able to formalize human concepts, and that is a serious challenge."
"It’s too expensive doing full verification in day-to-day programming. Instead of proving that my sort function always sorts, I can at least prove it doesn’t loop forever and never writes out of bounds. You can still get a lot of benefit out of this."
The post makes a strong case, IMO. Formal methods can be valuable, but they don't have the track record yet for anyone to believe they're the #1 essential thing about programming.