I'd agree, and the article basically says the same thing--the language is too expressive, and therefore hard to analyze. I don't know that much about the Ether devs, but I'd expect it just didn't occur to them--even among PL folks, knowledge & experience with something like coq is somewhat rare unless you went to the right undergrad or grad school. Especially if you weren't keeping up with the latest research in the last ~5-10 years or so.
Something like Coq with a few primitives to represent interacting with the Ether network, and an optimizing, verified cross compiler would have been a perfect fit for this sort of thing, in my opinion. It's a shame that they didn't go that route, the extra dev time to get it right probably wouldn't have been equivalent to 200+ dev-years of cost (~31 million).
Something like Coq with a few primitives to represent interacting with the Ether network, and an optimizing, verified cross compiler would have been a perfect fit for this sort of thing, in my opinion. It's a shame that they didn't go that route, the extra dev time to get it right probably wouldn't have been equivalent to 200+ dev-years of cost (~31 million).