Do you think the field is starting to regain attention? I have observed many positive indicators:
* Strong interest in the mathematics community to mechanize proofs, driven by Lean
* Some technical milestones, such as end-to-end proofs carried by the DeepSpec project
* Emerging synergies with AI, e.g. synthesis
* Some job openings in mainstream companies, e.g. Google
* Respectable number of grant calls and studentships related to the topic, growing from close to zero
* Funded work by cryptocurrency platforms to verify smart contracts, after multi-million fiascos
Is this a promising field to work on? What advances do you expect during this decade?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare#Apologies_and_retractions
If funding, then maybe. You point to some promising signs.
If real world results, then it may thaw... slightly. Formal methods are not going to become very mainstream, though, unless they scale linearly with code base size. Real world code bases are too big for anything else.