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Does anyone else think that Solidity is far too low-level for the purpose it serves? I really don't think connecting to ports (as an example) should be somethin

Does anyone else think that Solidity is far too low-level for the purpose it serves? I really don't think connecting to ports (as an example) should be something in a financial contract.

keymone 6y ago
It’s far too everything. Too low level, too high level, bad abstractions, bad syntactic constructs, bad evaluation model. The more I see people burning themselves on “smart contracts” the more I realize how deeply thought through bitcoin’s design is. Creators have thought of so many things in advance, it’s outright creepy.
- kinakomochidayo 6y ago
  Well, Bitcoin design WAS well thought out, until Blockstream nerfed it, and pushed its own product, Lightning Network.
  - keymone 6y ago
    That’s a myth. Blocksize limit increase was rejected by all parties relevant to bitcoin: miners, developers, users, and merchants. Blockstream has no control over bitcoin protocol. They built a product on top of it and there isn’t anything in bitcoin that prevents you from building a competing product.
Animats 6y ago
Yes. They should have gone with something simple and declarative, like decision tables.[1] Those have a finite number of cases and can be exhaustively tested. Which is what you want for a smart contract for something real. But no, they had to make it Turing-complete. That failed quickly. Remember the DAO debacle. That should have been a teaching moment. But no. Because the people burned were insiders, the whole Etherium blockchain was split to rescue them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_table
- intotheabyss 6y ago
  How has it failed? Seems to me that turing completeness has allowed Ethereum to flourish.
  - FridgeSeal 6y ago
    Yeah which is why I buy coffee in the morning with Ethereum right?
    - Sargos 6y ago
      Thinking that buying coffee is an important use case for Ethereum is pretty ignorant. It's literally holding billions of dollars in value and building an ecosystem of companies that work together with a shared purpose. Just because you can't buy a coffee with Ethereum for some reason doesn't mean it's somehow failed.
- pacoWebConsult 6y ago
  At the very least people should be formally verifying the behavior of their smart contracts before investing millions of dollars in them. The ETH VM is actually pretty simple to model and formally verify at least some of the basic properties of contracts.
  - Animats 6y ago
    Formally verify against what? You need some simple model of what's supposed to happen to verify against.
michaelsbradley 6y ago
What do you mean by "connecting to ports"? https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.7.0/search.html?q=port https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.7.0/search.html?q=port
- atarian 6y ago
  That was a wrong example. I just skimmed the code at the end of the article, which turns out is not Solidity.

Does anyone else think that Solidity is far too low-level for the purpose it serves? I really don't think connecting to ports (as an example) should be something in a financial contract.

keymone 6y ago

It’s far too everything. Too low level, too high level, bad abstractions, bad syntactic constructs, bad evaluation model. The more I see people burning themselves on “smart contracts” the more I realize how deeply thought through bitcoin’s design is. Creators have thought of so many things in advance, it’s outright creepy.

kinakomochidayo 6y ago
Well, Bitcoin design WAS well thought out, until Blockstream nerfed it, and pushed its own product, Lightning Network.
- keymone 6y ago
  That’s a myth. Blocksize limit increase was rejected by all parties relevant to bitcoin: miners, developers, users, and merchants. Blockstream has no control over bitcoin protocol. They built a product on top of it and there isn’t anything in bitcoin that prevents you from building a competing product.

Animats 6y ago

Yes. They should have gone with something simple and declarative, like decision tables.[1] Those have a finite number of cases and can be exhaustively tested. Which is what you want for a smart contract for something real. But no, they had to make it Turing-complete. That failed quickly. Remember the DAO debacle. That should have been a teaching moment. But no. Because the people burned were insiders, the whole Etherium blockchain was split to rescue them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_table

intotheabyss 6y ago
How has it failed? Seems to me that turing completeness has allowed Ethereum to flourish.
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  Yeah which is why I buy coffee in the morning with Ethereum right?
  - Sargos 6y ago
    Thinking that buying coffee is an important use case for Ethereum is pretty ignorant. It's literally holding billions of dollars in value and building an ecosystem of companies that work together with a shared purpose. Just because you can't buy a coffee with Ethereum for some reason doesn't mean it's somehow failed.
pacoWebConsult 6y ago
At the very least people should be formally verifying the behavior of their smart contracts before investing millions of dollars in them. The ETH VM is actually pretty simple to model and formally verify at least some of the basic properties of contracts.
- Animats 6y ago
  Formally verify against what? You need some simple model of what's supposed to happen to verify against.

michaelsbradley 6y ago

What do you mean by "connecting to ports"? https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.7.0/search.html?q=port https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.7.0/search.html?q=port

atarian 6y ago
That was a wrong example. I just skimmed the code at the end of the article, which turns out is not Solidity.