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4 Famous Blockchains and the Programming Languages They’re Built With
It’s not all C++
Blockchain technology is a fascination. Especially for developers, it challenges what you know and understands about tech. Therefore, blockchain tech hooked me very early. Like with all tech stacks, there is something we can learn from it. So, which programming languages do the blockchains use? And what justifies their choice? Let’s see how the brave new world is built!
Cardano — Haskell
I love the Cardano blockchain. The more I wanted to find out what it is driven by. When doing so, I was surprised: Haskell is the programming language driving Cardano. Nearly everything, the wallet, the nodes, and the smart contract language, are based on Haskell. But what is Haskell?
Surely you heard of this programming language. Yet, most don’t know what it is. It’s not your fault. Haskell isn’t very popular as a programming language.
The paradigm of Haskell is functional programming. The language forces you to write functional code. Everything revolves around functions and immutable data. Therefore, so-called side effects don’t belong to Haskell’s style. Side effects? This is the name for operations like changing the value of a global variable from within a function.
Admittedly, writing purely functional code is hard, at least to me. Yet, everything that is more of a challenge pays off somewhere. In Haskell’s case, it might be how reliable your written code is. This is exactly why the Cardano blockchain chose Haskell as their main driver — they describe it as a great choice for building reliable code, which is essential for building a blockchain.
Also, Haskell is quite famous in the academic world. Especially among mathematicians, Haskell is getting more popular — therefore, a great choice for Cardano, which consists of many math PhDs.
Algorand — Go and C
Algorand skyrocketed in the last few days and is currently position #18 in market capitalization. Also, Algorand is one of my favorite blockchain projects. The funny: Its main programming language, Go, is also one of my favorite ones. To me, Golang feels like if Python and C had a baby.
