> The FOM folk are in general incredibly bearish on proof assistants, so of course they don't care. If you only care about an 'ultimate' foundation that is the best fit to evaluate other systems, rather than a foundation that is amenable to actively working with it, of course you have no reason to care about HoTT.

> If you share their opinion, alright, but I personally find this incredibly myopic.

I want to distinguish between two senses of "foundation of mathematics":

1) An ontologically minimal language to formalize mathematical reasoning and facilitate proving things about (in)consistency, provability, and relative theory strength, and generally doing metamathematics.

2) A language to actually carry out the details of formalizing mathematics, perhaps jointly by humans and computers, in the sense of the Xena Project and proof assistants.

Here is a claim which might annoy you, but really ought to be uncontroversial: the correct meaning of the term "foundation of mathematics" is the first one. This is what it has meant for about a hundred years, at least, and what someone working professionally in the reverse mathematics/set theory/model theory/logic communities will understand the phrase to mean if you use it in conversation with them.

Now, given this, and given you agree that ZFC does a better job at function (1) above, I think this explains why the FOM people (and more generally those in the communities I listed) find it strange when HoTT is suggested as a "foundation of mathematics." (I can't speak to their opinions on proof assistants, though.) You can see this quite explicitly when Harvey Friedman starts asking questions of the HoTT people; he always asks something about ontological parsimony, remarks how simple the ZFC axioms are (and tells a story about explaining them to his barber, or whatever), and remarks how homotopy is much too sophisticated a concept to be truly foundational.

Moreover, they are going to regard any criticism that ZFC is deficient because it's a poor choice for function (2) as totally besides the point. That's akin to arguing that Turing machines are a poor choice for the foundations of computational theory because it's hard to program them in practice. The same response to applies to your second point about how type theory is "closer to how people actually work"; this was never a figure of merit in the first place.

So, I indeed share this view, but I don't think it's myopic. I think it follows immediately from what a "foundation of mathematics" is.

> I'm not sure I understand. So you _do_ accept intuitionistic type theory as a valid alternative to ZFC when one actually wants to formalize mathematics?

Yes, with the caveat noted below. The practical formalization of mathematics is an engineering problem, not properly speaking one of foundations, as discussed above. This is not to say it's not a deep and interesting problem, just that the difficulties there are mostly orthogonal to those encountered when doing, e.g. metamathematics. One ought to do whatever makes formalization easiest for practitioners.

> Because HoTT is actually experimental research that could be a breakthrough for intuitionistic type theory

This is not compelling to me because I think intuitionism is boring and misguided. I think the majority of practicing mathematicians feel the same way. Of course, you can just add axioms to make it classical, but I'd wager the emphasis on intuitionism is another thing that turns people off from HoTT.

> I'm actually rather surprised that Kevin Buzzard's work is so popular here - he's certainly doing great work, but there hasn't really been any significant news for the past years.

He and his crew have actually formalized a good chunk of real mathematics. That's fairly significant, in my mind.

(You have probably already read this, but in case someone reading this post doesn't know what I mean: https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2020/02/09/where-is-the-fa....)

Also, given that it's an engineering problem, there are going to be a bunch of difficulties that only pop up once you start playing with it. So the fact that a group of people have started playing with it, and found some of these problems, and iterated Lean in response – that's good!