Hi, i just learned about this project and i’m building a plotter+farmer like many of you here. I was also interested in how smart contracts will work on Chia so I’m starting to learn about ChiaLisp. Despite all the benefits of functional programming, the language is less accessible to me and probably others (compared to solidity which is JS-like).
How are people thinking about attracting developers to the platform? Has there been any discussion about interoperability with EVM? I’m not sure if this is possible but i imagine it would help with adoption considering EVM chains are running away with usage.
Feel free to move my post or direct me to outside resource, i’m just trying to learn more about the long term vision of the project
so it looks like some relevant discussion about this happens in keybase dev channel instead - in case anyone else on this forum is interested in the topic
When you’re learning Lisp, the thing to remember (after cursing the name of John McCarthy) is that the core mechanics revolve around manipulating lists, and the language syntax itself is a bunch of lists. That makes it natural to write programs that read and write the code of other programs.
Thus I can see the appeal for smart contracts where indeed code is data.
Nonetheless I’m certainly curious about the history of this design; it does strike me as a risky bet for the reasons you mention. The audience that will immediately appreciate its virtues is pretty limited to a certain vintage of CS cirricula that was once influential. Here for example is a 2018 tweet from Bram appearing to express that “WTF is this sh*t?” that anyone getting into Lisp experiences.
for sure lol, i actually count myself among that audience, having learned Hoon for “fun”. If the economic incentive exists to use ChiaLisp, i would be happy to. Better auditability / turing-completeness are great and might alone be worth the switch, but i still wonder about adoption.
you could also argue that the higher barrier to entry is a feature (keep inexperience i.e. exploitable code off the platform). but i personally prefer the “easy and open to all” approach
