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An Introduction to Michelson: the Scripting Language of Tezos (Part 1)
Learn how to use the Michelson programming language and write smart contracts on Tezos
Michelson must be one of the most exciting programming languages for smart contracts at the moment. It’s a stack-based, strictly typed language in which smart contracts are written to ensure the safety of the Tezos blockchain. Michelson is comparable to the bytecode of the Ethereum smart contracts but it’s more readable, safer, and more robust. All the high-level languages you can use to write smart contracts for Tezos — like SmartPy, Ligo, or Lorentz — eventually compile down to Michelson.
In this first article, we will dip our toes into Michelson language, understand what “stack-based” means and write some very simple smart contracts. This article is mainly written for beginners in programming and/or Tezos development, but intermediate programmers who want to know more about Michelson will also find useful information here. We are going to use the Jupyter kernel developed by Baking Bad to write Michelson code in the Jupyter notebook. You will find a link in each section if you want to see the code at work.
Let’s write some code!
