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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

Has the primary language for writing Ethereum contracts been improved? Or is it still a poor language with respect to its type system and other features?

I wasn't that interested in it, but the idea of programmable contracts was intriguing. The main issue is that they should be declarative/logical in nature, as that's what most contracts are, instead the primary language was imperative and had a weak type system (inexpressive). Has this situation improved or are all contracts written in it still destined to have many bugs due to the poor language design?

EDIT: Had to look it up, forgot the name, it's Solidity.

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Nope, they're still using Solidity.

http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/smart_contracts.html :

> "Solidity, while being an interesting proof of concept, is dangerously under-contained and very difficult to analyze statically."

Solidity docs are here: http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/solidity-in-depth....

No referential transparency, no purity, no algebraic data types . . . it's scary stuff for writing contracts.

It sounds like the core team has realized what a hole they're in and are taking it seriously, which is great. But I think a lot of the Etherium-related businesses still have no idea what a sandy foundation they're building on. It's going to be ugly.

That's unfortunate. I don't see Ethereum as the future or being long-lived in its current form, but as a proof of concept it has value. Unfortunately, critical flaws in early projects can kill momentum and interest and delay progress for years. See the 1980s and the AI Winter. Overpromised, misunderstood, and underdelivered. This led to reductions in research funding and delays in developments (admittedly, faster and cheaper computers made a lot of those developments either easier or feasible, where the problems being solved may have been intractable in the 80s and 90s).

Solidity is the most widely adopted language, but there are other choices including Serpent (Python-like)and LLL (lisp-like).

A few developers I know use Serpent because it is simple and stable (meaning it has not been changed or updated for a while, unlike Solidity which they say is continually being tweaked in a manner that can be aggravating).

Interestingly, Vitalik's preferred language (say for prototyping Casper algorithms) is Python. He created Serpent and is now working on Viper, which sounds like a next-generation Serpent. Viper is being implemented in Python3.

You can see the work in progress at: https://github.com/ethereum/viper

Python is a nightmare for static analysis. Basing anything contract-related on it is the opposite of reassuring.

I think there are some really cool ideas in Etherium. Proof-of-stake is great. Provably terminating functions are great! These ideas deserve to be paired with a higher level language worthy of them.

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