Keagan McClelland
Jul 21, 2017 · 1 min read

I think that programming languages that afford us the ability to do static analysis of some kind will be critically important going forward. Having something with an extraordinarily strong type system, perhaps even dependently typed language would seem particularly apt in this case. The obvious first thing that comes to mind is Haskell. While I don’t believe that It would be a good idea to port Haskell straight to the EVM, it’s probably worth taking some (perhaps even a lot) of cues from that camp. While it might seem at first that pure functional programming may be bad for things that manipulate state, it is a misconception that they eradicate it entirely as much as they try to control it. That said, the problem with any high level language for the EVM has to have extraordinarily good compilers because the cost of an operation is substantially higher than it was in pre-blockchain compute models. The interesting thing here is that it might finally make good programming languages and compilers valuable enough to make a living on.

I’ve often felt that good PL design has been under-appreciated for so long, due to the move fast and break things culture the internet gave us, especially with the truth that the language that powers much of the internet was designed in one pay cycle. I think the day has come when those of us who have been preaching statically typed pure FP, might finally be heard.

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    Keagan McClelland

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