[federicobond]

Being a good, secure language for writing smart contracts is absolutely one of the most important goals for Solidity. I can say so because I have been involved as a regular contributor to the compiler for more than a year. If onboarding a lot of people to the platform quickly were the goal instead, they would have ported some crippled version of Java or JS and called it a day.

The problem is that it's just not easy to get all those details right from day 1, and interest in Ethereum has grown way faster than its capacity to produce a reliable, mature set of tools around it.

[mrkgnao]

To pick just one: mutable state by default is very difficult to justify as being a decision intended to promote security in a tool that is literally meant to construct financial/contractual instruments.

[federicobond]

Not that difficult. There is not much point in creating immutable contracts since they act like singletons.

This is different from the kinds of objects that you would instantiate in a language like Java, where best practices suggest defining as immutable unless you have a good reason not to.

[int_19h]

Just because a contract is mutable doesn't mean that everything needs to be.

For starters, not all functions on the contract are supposed to be mutating. Marking those that are as such would catch accidental mistakes when unnecessary mutations happen.

Then there's the issue with structs, collections etc all also being mutable by default, which is separate of contracts.

Finally, none of this actually requires any mutability at all. A contract could treated as a pure function that takes initial state as input, and returns the new state as output. Such a function can be written without any mutations at all, by constructing the new state piece by piece from the old one.

Sure, it would be a more verbose (although functional languages usually offer shortcuts like "give me a copy of this object, but with these fields set to different values", making it not so verbose after all). But on the other hand, it means that you have to explicitly consider the effect of every operation of the contract on every bit of state. "Don't repeat yourself" is not always a good thing - when it comes to security, you often do actually want to make people do redundant things, e.g.: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-ja....

[_skel]

These things are not just details. Things like scope, mutability, and operator precedence are core language design decisions.