Hello, I am a neophyte in all things Crypto. My initial research has led me to Cardano Foundation.
I fully appreciate the foundations goals and their careful process. I would like to think that Cardano ADA is a solid investment. My sense of Cardano and the ADA coin is that they deserve to be successful and my hope is that that will be the case. However I do have some questions and I hope that this forum might provide some answers/enlightenment. It seems that development on Cardono ADA is all done on “Haskell” where most of the major development activity is being carried out on “EVM.” This makes it look as if Cardona ADA will be shut out of much development activity and that it could just die a slow death. If you were as old as I am you might remember the fight between “Beta” and “VHS.” Beta was clearly the better platform, no one denied this fact. However, The “VHS” format, although inferior, became ubiquitous , won the battle and “BETA” simply disappeared.
My question is:
What will keep the sheer magnitude of “EVM” development from simply overwhelming “Haskell” projects??? I would be delighted to hear from you. Thanks in Advance.
JBD
The Haskell question comes up regularly. I think
and
were the last larger threads that maybe contain some pointers.
Additionally, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (I suppose that is what you mean by “EVM”) cannot be compared directly to Haskell. One is an environment, in which contracts can be executed on the Ethererum blockchain, the other is a programming language, two totally different things.
Yes, Cardano could have chosen to use the same language for its contracts/dApps as Ethereum. It’s called Solidity. But the choice was to use a language – Plutus – that is more tightly integrated with the rest of the Cardano code, which is already written in Haskell. Moreover, an additional, less complex language – Marlowe – will be provided on top of that.
In the end, I think it’s less important than people tend to think. Pure users should never come in contact with the languages used to implement a cryptocurrency ecosystem. And even for developers in decentralised fincance, “smart” contract, dApp projects, the on-chain contracts will be the smallest part of their code by far. It’s much more important to have a good use case, marketing, user interface (written in totally standard languages), …
The contract will not be a project with thousands of lines of code in hundreds of modules. It cannot be, since it has to be deployed redundantly (some would say inefficiently) to thousands of nodes that run the blockchain. They all have to redundantly compute every step of the contract. Moreover, such projects should document their contracts for all their users to understand, where they should put their money in. That’s another reason, why contracts should be so short and have such a low complexity, that it hardly matters if it is written in Marlowe, Plutus or Solidity.