[spopejoy]

Pact is fundamentally different from Hopper, reflecting our goal to create the right database metaphor for blockchain systems. You can see Bitcoin as a single-purpose versioned key-value database with support for authorization with public keys.

Pact generalizes the versioned key-value database to be key-row, maintains a full history, and the rest of the language allows you to enforce whatever invariants you want, with whatever key-based authorization scheme you need.

As such, Pact is really a very simple language, which is really important for business adoption. If people are going to be entrusting code to execute contracts, you have to be able to read that code with some hope of understanding what it means. This is also why Pact is interpreted, not compiled: that way you can easily see what code is stored in the ledger.

[davidgerard]

... and you avoid problems like the Solidity compiler bug, where you could have written perfect, provably correct contract code, and the thing you're running it on could still open an exploit. The exploit could still have happened with interpreted code, but at least then it would be fixable.