[mbrock]

I'm not sure that it is super humanly difficult. It seems likely that programming patterns, such as not using I trusted external sends at all, will emerge that any contract will need to abide by to be trusted.

If what you say is true then Ethereum is DOA, which seems unlikely to me. (I don't own any ETH.) I totally agree that it would be great to have more language based security and I've started dabbling with some stuff myself (playing with verified byte code compilation in Agda) but my basic attitude is that worse is better, these hacks are unfortunate but educational, and now we're going to see way more care in contract construction and let's hope it works out.

It might be that Solidity is going to be replaced, and it's super interesting what will come. A bunch of people are insisting that some variant of functional programming with types is necessary for correct contracts but I'm skeptical until I see an actual proposal...

[jerf]

And there are still people running around who think that writing code based on threads and semaphores isn't superhumanly difficult and people just need to Try Harder (TM).

At least when they're wrong, they usually don't lose millions of dollars. (But only... usually.)

I think some people are mentally modeling Ethereum as a sort of hobby thing in their head when they say things like that. I mean, who cares if my hobby static-rendering blog platform has a few bugs in it, right? But Ethereum aspires to be the foundation of an economy. Real foundations of economies have billions of dollars worth of effort poured into them. While a small set of particularly brilliant people may produce something that can run in this environment, Ethereum isn't what it would look like if they did.

I also think that people don't realize that the usual fate of a cryptocurrency is to die. Bitcoin isn't the first cryptocurrency by a long shot. Cryptocurrencies in general are not strong, robust things. I think something like Ethereum is quite likely, but there's no particular reason to believe we aren't three or four more major fully independent stabs at the problem away from a stable solution. Ethereum makes Bitcoin look like a homework problem in comparison; it would almost be beyond belief that we'd get it right the first time.

[mbrock]

I think humans are capable of writing correct programs even in machine code, it's just tricky and requires some expertise.

I also think the EVM itself allows for other paradigms than Solidity that might make it easy to create certain kinds of contracts.

And I think worse is better is very powerful, so it wouldn't surprise me if Ethereum sticks along for a long time, like Bitcoin seems to be doing despite its flaws.