After far too long watching crypto from afar and being fascinated, it’s time to dive in. A twitter friend recommended cryptozombies.io as a good learning platform so giving it a try!

Solidity is Ethereum’s native language. Code is encapsulated in contracts - all variables and functions belong to a contract. File extension is .sol

Always start your code with the version prgram, a declaration of the Solidity compiler you are using.

Here’s an bare bones contract:

pragma solidity >=0.5.0 <0.6.0;

contract HelloWorld {

}

State variables are stored in contract storage, written to the blockchain. So this is durable storage.

contract Example {
  // Persistent storage
  uint unsignedInt = 100; // non negative obviously
}

Solidity has structs, which I’m surprised they don’t have more complicated object system. We’ll see what more they have.

Type definitions are lower case, string, uint, etc.

Solidity has dynamic arrays built in to the language which is pretty great:

//dynamic
uint[] dynamic;
uint[2] fixed;

You can make a variable public, which makes a getter function and allows other contracts to read but not write the data. That feels very powerful, and is the whole point of crypto - data sharing!

Funny how the public keyword is after the type definition:

Zombie[] public zombies;

Functions looks normal, somewhat similar syntax to what I’m familiar with:

function writeBlog(string memory _name, uint _amount) public {

}

Again we have the public syntax for exposing the function. The memory keyword is necessary for types that pass by reference, to signify if something should be stored in memory or on the blockchain I assume.

It’s convention to start function parameter variable names with an _.

Solidity has the concept of passing by value or reference.

Structs are pretty straightforward to create and initialize:

struct BlogArticle {
    uint id;
    string content;
}

BlogArticle[] public articles;

BlogArticle article = BlogArticle(1,"Hello World");

articles.push(article)

Functions are public by default in Solidity, which means other smart contracts can call your function and mutate your state. It’s best to mark functions are private therefore.

function _test(uint _test) private {

}

It’s convention to start private function names with a _.

Function return types are also pretty standard, if verbose:

function sayHi() public view returns (string response) {
    return "What's up!";
}

We marked this as a view function because it’s not mutating any state and is only viewing state - I assume that gives us some performance boosts or something.

The above function could also be marked as pure since it doesn’t even view state, it just accesses the function return parameters. The Solidity compiler will tell you when to mark it - I’m surprised it doesn’t just automatically figure it out so you don’t need the keyword at all.

Apparently secure random number generators are a big problem which makes sense, there’s a lot of attack vector’s if you can compromise the RNG.

Solidity has typecasting - yay? Always hate typecasting.

Solidity has events, which are published to the blockchain for front end apps to listen to:

event Hello(string hello);
emit Hello("Hello World!")

Ethereum has a wrapper library for javascript, makes sense.

Impressions

Initial impressions are they are really trying to gamify this site. Perfectly fine, but doesn’t work too well for me - it feels a little infantilizing.

Definetly focuses on hands on practical knowledge, without much theory. Excited for a book to get some theory but this is great for stepping in.

It’s definetly nice to see the reality of Ethereum - reading other people’s opinions is great, but there’s so much FUD in this space. It’s refreshing to find solid ground and build ideas for myself.