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by federicobond 3252 days ago
None of the languages that you mention target the EVM, and the changes required to do so would turn them into restricted versions that look kind of like the original ones but have several differences that you need to keep in mind while programming in them. It makes quite a lot of sense to create a new language that takes advantage of the particular features provided by the EVM.

It's also quite hard for programmers to reason about performance or complexity in most functional languages. In the EVM, all functions should either be O(1) or bounded O(n) and should strive to use the most economical bytecode available to perform each task.

Disclaimer: I am a regular contributor to Solidity.
2 comments
vog 3251 days ago
> should strive to use the most economical bytecode available to perform each task.

This is why I criticized the VM design as well as the language.

Yes, much effort went into making "cycle counting" as simple and straight forward as possible.

But I don't see any comparable effort doing the same for safety and correctness. (Apart from providing crypto primitives by the VM, which is neat, but only the tip of the iceberg in terms of language design.)

> It's also quite hard for programmers to reason about performance or complexity in most functional languages

This is true for Haskell, but "most" other functional languages don't suffer this issue: SML, OCaml, F#, Rust, etc.

Also note that lots of effort already went into creating lambda calculus variants where performance is especially easy to reason about. However, dismissing functional langauges as a whole already demonstrates that none that the research played any role in the design of EVM and Solidity.

In case you are interested, here is a nice starting point about the state of the art of 2014: "Structure and Efficiency of Computer Programs" https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/papers/secp/secp.pdf

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federicobond 3250 days ago
> This is true for Haskell, but "most" other functional languages don't suffer this issue: SML, OCaml, F#, Rust, etc.

I don't have much experience with the ML family of languages, so I may have jumped to conclusions based on my previous experience with Haskell/Elm, but I did not intend it to sound as a dismissal of functional languages at all.

In fact, there is a growing community of researchers working on functional language design for the EVM, but I would wager that it's way more complex to build such a compiler than something a bit more "close to the metal", especially since no one had much experience with the implications of the memory/storage/execution model of Ethereum at the time work started on Solidity, let alone the kinds of vulnerabilities these contracts would be exposed to.

Hindsight is 20/20.

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naasking 3248 days ago
> especially since no one had much experience with the implications of the memory/storage/execution model of Ethereum at the time work started on Solidity, let alone the kinds of vulnerabilities these contracts would be exposed to.

Perhaps the Ethereum devs didn't have this experience, but this experience and knowledge was out there. The E programming language has been a vehicle for smart contract and security research for over 20 years. How many Ethereum and/or Solidity devs read the E research, learned the E language and played around with it?

There is also decades of research on formalized smart contract languages. Nick Szabo is well known in this space, and he wrote a draft paper on a great contract language back in 2002:

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/contract-language/

How many of the devs have read this paper?

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federicobond 3243 days ago
I mentioned that no one had much experience with the implications of Ethereum's model and you point me to a bunch of articles but I fail to see how they apply to the case of Solidity.

What are the big ideas from E that Solidity is missing?

Also, the article by Nick Szabo has some interesting ideas, but as far as I understand, it does not describe a language for programming arbitrary smart contracts, just some notation for common financial contracts.

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eternalban 3251 days ago
> It's also quite hard for programmers to reason about performance or complexity in most functional languages

Yet another data point for 'why a TC language is a bad choice for smart contracts'.

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