5 ms·

Ethereum's smart contracts were a good example of why this probably won't happen anytime soon...

• Jtsummers 10y ago
  Solidity is a terrible language for designing contracts in. It's not an effective counterexample as it seems to be such a poorly considered construct to begin with.
  • mannykannot 10y ago
    The problem with Ethereum is not 'just' a poor language, it is the general difficulty of verifying a Turing-complete anything. http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2016/07/23/correctness-and-complexity/ http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2016/07/23/correctness-and-c... The same applies to all 'formal law language' proposals.
    • Jtsummers 10y ago
      I didn't say the problem was "just" a poor language. I said that Solidity is a poor example of a language for writing contracts in. I didn't say it would be easy to develop one, certainly not a universal one. But Solidity is not a counterexample, itself, to the idea of a "formal law language". It's just an example of a language totally unsuited for its intended domain.
      • mannykannot 10y ago
        >I didn't say the problem was "just" a poor language. It was the only specific point you made in support of your position.
        • Jtsummers 10y ago
          Sorry, I wrote it at 2am and my girlfriend distracted me from finishing my thought. Maybe I shouldn't have hit "reply", but I did. Even so, a post making one point doesn't mean it's the author's only point or what they consider "just" the problem. Take it at face value, it was a post making a singular point: Solidity (Ethereum's language) is a bad language for writing contracts in, so it makes it difficult to consider Ethereum an example of problems with formalized/programmatic contracts.