Wanna build on Cardano but you come from JS and Plutus/Haskell makes you dizzy? I feel you.
I have long wanted to at least experiment on Cardano smart contracts but every time I try to learn Haskell or Plutus, I just end up putting it off 'coz the first few minutes of reading docs or watching videos make me fall asleep. Things are just annoyingly different to what I’m used to.
And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one getting this reaction.
But don’t get me wrong. I love what we do here in Cardano. This is the first crypto community I joined and I have never left since then. It’s been almost 4 years now.
So when I saw the community introducing alternatives like Opshin, Aiken, and Plu-ts, I got really excited. Especially with Plu-ts since it is the one closest to JS. But their docs right now seem to be far from complete.
Then I found Helios. Great documentation, easy to understand and easy to use for someone like me. There’s a comprehensive TypeScript API for compiling contracts and building transactions. The smart contract language itself looks and feels very intuitive; again, considering my JS background. The only thing missing for me are more examples. But the community provided that part anyway. Lots of smart people willing to help!
So now, let me share with you a walkthrough or a guide of sorts that I’ve recently written, on creating a CIP-68 fungible token using TypeScript and Helios:
It’s the kind of walkthrough that I would have liked to follow when I was starting out on my journey to learning Cardano smart contracts. But I didn’t find something like this. Much less anything specifically on making CIP-68 fungible tokens.
I hope this will help promote greater developer adoption even just a tiny bit, considering the ocean of JS developers out there. At least a few of them probably feel the same way I did about smart contracts on Cardano. 