Software correctness & supply chain security, with Sean Allen

In this interview, Antithesis distinguished engineer and Pony core contributor Sean Allen discusses software correctness, arguing that strong type systems in the ML family (such as Rust's sum types and exhaustive matching) catch errors at compile time that ALGOL-family languages miss, and that "make illegal states unrepresentable" beats manual testing. He describes "workloads" like the Bank Test for validating database isolation guarantees, pushes back on treating quality as a late CI/CD "gate," and says there is no simple fix for supply chain security because robust languages like 'E' are unpopular while popular languages assume a trustworthy ecosystem.