Note that anything in the research stage does not have guaranteed results. I think the concepts look sound, insofar as I am able to understand. The hard maths of provable code exceed my own level of education (not only in Simplicity). Yet if you walk through the paper, I think youll find the general shape of Simplicity not difficult to grasp. Its called Simplicity for a(t least one) good reason: Its designed to provide a foundation which will be simple to use for building powerful smart contracts (never mind the R&D to get to that point). The people working on it do have a track record of delivering results. I look forward to seeing how this develops.
Nullius, thanks again for the heads up on Simplicity. I looked over the white paper and asked the Google his thoughts and am excited to give it a test drive in future. Especially the different combinators and convenants.
Ironically though, you sort of reinforced the point I had proposed earlier, in that by possibly using a functional language (Simplicity is functional), you lessen the chances of bad code due to the nature of functional languages having immutable state. In fact, Simplicity takes it a step further as they don't allow loops (page 1 of white paper) and use functions written in Haskell, another functional language (pg.24 of white paper) to generate Simplicity.
As these events occur again and again we get to reflect on code developers and their skills. Should they even be allow to release these coins?
Even though most of the coin source code is found in github, do people really go through them? They are usually provided with no clear explanation as to what is going on within the code. Much of the system is copied (forked) from previous projects and re-used. It takes quite some time and effort to figure out what is going on.
I see many people signing up for bounty programs for new coin announcements even though much of the business and/or technical details are missing. The only thing the announcements seem to boast are the bounty programs. These coins still raise millions of USD.
By looking at some meetups activities, it looks like the waves of new coins will continue if not pick up more speed. With such a madness to release coins so quickly, the coding errors are inevitable. But prior to talking about code bugs, the requirement errors should be first identified. I wonder if all these rapid releases even understand their own requirement.
I had eluded to "clean coding" in an earlier post. Whether you like Agile or not, many lessons taught by Uncle Bob relate to the issues brought up in this thread:
"Clean code is simple and direct. Clean code reads like well-written prose"
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3779106-clean-code-a-handbook-of-agile-software-craftsmanship-robert-c-martinIf we're depending on the open source community as a whole to advance these new ideas and new paradigms, I think it's vitally critical to write code so that anybody else can take it further very easily.
In regards to forking, I went to a great seminar last week where a VC/ICO investor brought up an interesting point in that since forking is more commonplace, what differentiating value can a company offer other than the product? For me, the answer was obvious. Great community of intelligent programmers. So the question is what do intelligent programmers want in a company? I think it was JFK who said:
"Ask not what your programmer can do for you, rather ask what you can do for your programmer" (drum hit!)
In regards to new coin announcements with critical business details missing, I completely agree. (pls can somebody explain why Cryptokitties has done so well and what their monetization strategy is??)
Part of the reason I joined this forum is my startup was going the traditional VC route, working on getting ACTUAL METRICS & TRACTION first but some of our competitors launched successful ICOs so I'm hoping to learn from all of you why any sane investor would invest in an ICO with NO metrics? We want to be the exact opposite and have maximum transparency, great metrics, great programmers (pm me) before we would even think of launching an ICO.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the VC venture capital world, ICOs are an existential threat to their industry, which is ironic since they are usually the ones disrupting entire industries. This is great for programmers who have great ideas because unless you're lucky enough to find a VC who shares your vision of the future, it can be very time consuming to raise capital.
Lastly, our company is a B Corp (public benefit corporation) and we'd like to set it up as a Teal corp for maximum transparency but am curious if people even care about that.
https://www.strategy-business.com/article/00344?gko=10921