[semiel]

I've been working in the Ethereum space for a year and a half, so I know my perspective is warped, but I really don't think the learning curve is that bad any more. Solidity isn't a very complicated language and has decent documentation[0], and Truffle[1] and TestRPC[2] can get you writing automated tests against a simulated blockchain more or less instantly.

It's still relatively early days, and there is a lot more work to do in making this stuff as friendly as possible, but progress has been pretty rapid.

[0] http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ [1] https://github.com/ConsenSys/truffle [2] https://github.com/ethereumjs/testrpc

[alistproducer2]

I specifically mentioned the platform, not solidity. It's pretty hard to be proficient with solidity if you are ignorant of the many abstractions, rules and constraints of the ethereum platform as the language is (intentionally) very tightly coupled to the smart contract abstraction and it's low level nature make it imperative that one understands a great deal about the protocol (bit lengths of various classes of data for example) before you can really get up and running.

Anything becomes easy if you look at it long enough. The major issue ethereum is going to have is making a case that there's a real-world value add relative to centralized, traditional architecture before many people will be willing to stare at it long enough for the easiness to set in.

[semiel]

I mostly disagree. You definitely need to know the basic abstractions and concepts, like blocks, transactions, and addresses. But they're not particularly harder than concepts like inheritance or pointers, and way easier than something like monads.

I can't think of any reason you'd need to know "bit lengths of various classes of data" for normal development.

> The major issue ethereum is going to have is making a case that there's a real-world value add relative to centralized, traditional architecture before many people will be willing to stare at it long enough for the easiness to set in.

I definitely agree with that.