That paper took 25 years to refine. Additionally, for the right audience, more math could make it more succinct.

I don't doubt it, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Would you elaborate?

I have a hard time already convincing myself that correct sequential imperative algorithms are indeed correct - which probably means that I'm a bad programmer, but I can't change who I am. So convincing myself that that Raft, a concurrent algorithm, is correct (meets its specification) from an informal description is completely out of question - where is the formal proof of correctness?

Take a look here for pointers to formal proofs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10017549

Specifically Verdi, a Coq framework for distributed system verification, which now includes a formally proven Raft implementation.

https://github.com/uwplse/verdi

This appears to be the main theorem, "raft_linearizable":

https://github.com/uwplse/verdi/blob/master/raft-proofs/EndT...

Thank you very much. :-)

Ah, sorry. I think you're reading this with a much deeper understanding of mathematics than I.

I'm really curious, though. Could you give me some insight into how algorithms are proven correct?