A mathematician's deep dive into Lean: tactics make formal proofs hard to read

burny_tech · x · 2026-09-08

A mathematician describes getting serious about formal languages, studying Lean (for its popularity, type theory, and Mathlib) while building a Peano-arithmetic language with AI agents.

His main obstacle: many tactics' architecture makes proofs very unfriendly to follow, and Lean's odd syntax confuses him when reading — unlike Magma, where ideas are encoded more naturally. He hints at improving this direction.

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