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Comment by davidgerard | Hacker News Reader

Actually, I think Solidity being designed to turn bad node.js coders into bad smart contract coders was key to Ethereum's success.

I've written a book on this (hit upload five minutes ago! release Monday!) which hammers on this point (and all the stuff surrounding this issue). I think Solidity is actually designed with worse is better in mind, because Ethereum is the first smart contract platform that anyone actually used. Some tried doing them in Bitcoin, but Ethereum's the first that gets lots of action. And so many other blockchains lift the smart contract functionality straight from Ethereum.

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That may be, but if so, it might be worse. What's worse, not getting a lot of uptake for this idea that's been hard going for others, or getting the uptake because of trade-offs you made that make it a ticking time-bomb that may damage the reputation of the idea for years to come and set it back?

Solidity is like PHP in the 90's, easy to learn and easy to screw up. Though Solidity just compiles to the EVM, and there is no reason new, safer languages can't be built on top.

As far as I can remember, the EVM has never failed, just programmers.

That comparison may be apt. PHP at that time was a mix of some good ideas (ease of deployment) with some horrible ones (register globals on by default is unexcusable), and some poor planning. We all lived with the fallout of that for a very long time.

The register globals issue could have been avoided at very little cost, if any cost at all, to the popularity and spread of the language and many millions of dollars and much personal information would have been saved.

I disagree, Solidity is really not easy to learn. It is easy to screw up, though.

You've wet my appetite. Got a link to your book?

Pedantry: you mean whet, not wet. To "whet" means to excite, stimulate.

Literally, to sharpen, as in "whetstone".

Check out his profile.

Thanks. Glad I checked the profile.

This should save anyone else a few clicks: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073CPP581

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