Do you guys plan to address these at some point?
Actually, let me rephrase this. For better or worse, Solidity is a shipping product now, so you're constrained in your ability to make breaking changes. However, its status as the "official" blessed EVM language can be changed without breaking compatibility. So I guess a better question is, are you planning to replace Solidity with a language that has more emphasis on safety in its design (even if it's called Solidity 2.0 or whatever... clearly it would have to significantly break backwards compatibility).
Now, I know that most feedback that you hear is to just take an existing functional language. But after looking at Solidity and EVM specs, I also see why this is not necessarily feasible. And, as one of your contributors has pointed out in this thread, functional style can often be too high-level to keep track of the underlying opcodes and their gas cost.
But even sticking with the imperative approach, I think it's clear that there's a lot that could be changed, starting with adopting some key principles like "explicit is better than implicit", "don't pick a default unless it's absolutely safe" etc. Looking at the design of Solidity, it's clear to me that the primary inspiration was JS with a dash of C++. The one thing that's common to both is that they allow and encourage "clever" code. Perhaps looking at Ada, Eiffel, and even COBOL for inspiration would be more appropriate for this niche.
In any case, if you're interested in specific suggestions on how to redesign, I do have some thoughts, and would be happy to share them.
Actually, let me rephrase this. For better or worse, Solidity is a shipping product now, so you're constrained in your ability to make breaking changes. However, its status as the "official" blessed EVM language can be changed without breaking compatibility. So I guess a better question is, are you planning to replace Solidity with a language that has more emphasis on safety in its design (even if it's called Solidity 2.0 or whatever... clearly it would have to significantly break backwards compatibility).
Now, I know that most feedback that you hear is to just take an existing functional language. But after looking at Solidity and EVM specs, I also see why this is not necessarily feasible. And, as one of your contributors has pointed out in this thread, functional style can often be too high-level to keep track of the underlying opcodes and their gas cost.
But even sticking with the imperative approach, I think it's clear that there's a lot that could be changed, starting with adopting some key principles like "explicit is better than implicit", "don't pick a default unless it's absolutely safe" etc. Looking at the design of Solidity, it's clear to me that the primary inspiration was JS with a dash of C++. The one thing that's common to both is that they allow and encourage "clever" code. Perhaps looking at Ada, Eiffel, and even COBOL for inspiration would be more appropriate for this niche.
In any case, if you're interested in specific suggestions on how to redesign, I do have some thoughts, and would be happy to share them.