Quote from: go1111111 on August 19, 2016, 09:05:37 AM

The gist of an earlier comment of yours seemed to be: "writing smart contracts is inherently hard and unnatural, so it's fine if the scripting language is hard to understand." I just don't see how one aspect of writing contracts being hard (getting the logic right) implies that it would be better for other aspects to be harder than they need to be.

If a declarative version of Bitcoin script made mistakes less likely, what is the downside? Are you worried about newbs who just learned a bit of javascript thinking they can write secure smart contracts just because Bitcoin script v2 might look a bit more like javascript? So the fact that current script looks intimidating is actually good? If so would it have been even better if Satoshi made all op codes of the form OP_XYZ where X, Y, and Z were digits? And maybe disallowed spaces when not including them would still be unambiguous? That would certainly reinforce in people's mind that writing Bitcoin script is tricky.

You misunderstood what I was saying.

A declarative model doesn't reflect the reality of these systems well. It is easier to get started, but hard to do things right, and very hard or impossible to to be confident that you got things right when you did.

A more functional model reflects the reality of the systems better, while also providing powerful scaling and analysis benefits. I believe it is possible to construct systems which are harder to get started, but once you get something working its very likely to get things right, and hard but far from impossible to _prove_ you're achieving the properties that you set out to achieve.

I haven't proven that better can be done, yet (unless you count Bitcoin script)-- but what DAO/ETH seem to be proving is that at least that design is too dangerous to be used-- when their highest profile contract, reviewed by the designers of the system/language, got robbed blind by a rather simple vulnerability.