Semi sarcastic request for startup: apply what we already know about creating a great developer experience (mostly functional, live, debuggable) towards an creating an alternative to Ethereum, and use all the 💰💰you earn to fund exploratory research (in the spirit of Protocol Labs)

Here's at least part of it https://pyrofex.io/.

Why do you think debuggability is a big thing, or the biggest thing missing in DAOs?

Sorry, important disclaimer: I have zero crypto experience. I just had dinner last night with people complaining about developer tooling there

You experience is greater than mine.

red-lang.org went blockchain (a year ago?) to get funded.

There is a lot of stuff going on in the space

@curious_reader 100% correct plus, plus! you're writing in a language as semantically pure as JavaScript! Having seriously considered putting hundreds of millions on the line in Ethereum code, we backed away... slowly. And that was a bit before the hype engine got going a few years back.

That’s why I’m watching that distributed ledger space curiously, but cautiously — I think it’s a great path and an important development for our technological future, but we still haven’t figured out how to write reliable software. We’re already building more and more fundamental systems on a wobbly foundation of software, discovering bugs, overlooked requirements, and unintended consequences as we go and leaving a massive and widening gap between people who can understand what’s going on and those who don’t. I don’t think we’re ready to move something as fundamental to society as a currency so deeply into technology. Yet. I’m mildly calmed by the fact that crypto currencies are more math than software — that we seem to have a firmer grasp on as much as correctness is concerned.

I'm quite skeptical of the entire space for various reasons. One is there seem to be one too many fly-by-night operators or folks who "oops, accidentally" lost all your money. Second, I still don't get the value proposition. Almost all applications seem better handled by third-party escrow like set-ups. In the end conflict resolution has to be in courts. Perhaps some interesting and super useful stuff will come out that will change my mind.. we'll see.

It’s interesting to see all people being “sceptical” 😅

I’m German. We tried this perspective 90 years ago. Didn’t work out so well. 😜

So in a sense it’s a reflection of society

Yeah I don't doubt useful stuff can come out of the space. But at this point the hype to value ratio seems way off the charts. I also agree that interest and hype alone can actually be the driver of culture and when a lot of folks and money gets involved, great stuff can come from it. But until that happens I'm in the wait and watch boat. The projects looks interesting. But some statements activate my overhype-ometer (e.g. "We incorporate these into a formally verified functional programming approach, which allows us to provide unprecedented correctness guarantees.") This talk argues that total languages (~guaranteed to terminate) don't particularly help verification (link to section about total languages): . So I think while there may be many super useful things in these projects and maybe even a better programing model than the mainstream, the claims made are so strong that a heavy burden of proofs and demonstration is needed. I mean, who cares if a program is provably correct if it takes a team 5 months to encode a useful program correctly (maybe the language is mind bending) and the compiler 2 days to verify it (maybe the total number of states is huge). So real world scenarios need to be demonstrated.

If anything is to be adopted for "smart contracts" the language of said contracts should be one with clearly readable logic so that non-programmers feel confident in using it. If we build these things only for developers then only developers will use them and the promise of the smart contract future will wither. I have seen some work on DSLs for Ether which make some progress in that direction but I don't get why they choose to base their language on JS to begin with.

Do you really think that non-programmers would prefer logic? I don’t think so. There is a reason Leibniz didn’t fulfill his goals with his https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis

Oh Characteristica Universalis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis! (I'm posting back to #C5T9GPWFL since we're experiencing topic drift on the Ethereum thread.) You should all know that Leibniz (1646-1716), as in the other originator of calculus and the d/dx notation, toyed with the idea of a language, a symbol system in which geometric composition of the symbols would correspond in some natural way to inference. At thirty, it thought the project could be completed in five years. At 60, he still liked the idea, though imagined more investigators would be necessary, "It is true that in the past I planned a new way of calculating suitable for matters which have nothing in common with mathematics ["mathematics" seems to have been defined more narrowly 300 years ago], and if this kind of logic were put into practice, every reasoning, even probabilistic ones, would be like that of the mathematician: if need be, the lesser minds which had application and good will could, if not accompany the greatest minds, then at least follow them. For one could always say: let us calculate, and judge correctly through this, as much as the data and reason can provide us with the means for it. But I do not know if I will ever be in a position to carry out such a project, which requires more than one hand; and it even seems that mankind is still not mature enough to lay claim to the advantages which this method could provide." By 70, he lamented, "I have spoken to the Marquis de l'Hôpital and others about my general algebra, but they have paid no more attention to it than if I had told them about a dream of mine. I should have to support it too by some obvious application, but to achieve this it would be necessary to work out at least a part of my characteristic, a task which is not easy, especially in my present condition and without the advantage of discussions with men who could stimulate and help me in work of this nature." Could have used a friendly Slack.