Thread by @oliverjumpertz

This is a short introduction to Solidity, the programming language used to create smart contracts on the Ethereum VM.

🧵👇🏻

1️⃣ What Is Solidity?

Solidity is an object-oriented, high-level programming language designed to implement smart contracts on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

It is statically typed, supports inheritance, libraries, and complex user-defined types.

Solidity is a domain-specific language. Besides Python or JavaScript, which are general-purpose languages, Solidity is only meant to be used for smart contract development.

The language was initially proposed in 2014 and later released as the primary language of smart contract development on Ethereum by the Ethereum foundation.

It is inspired by languages like C/C++, JavaScript, as well as Python.

2️⃣ What Is Solidity Used For?

As already stated, Solidity is used to create smart contracts. You can imagine the latter to be like specific objects, in this case, contracts.

A smart contract is a program that runs on a blockchain. Within this contract, any interaction between contracts of the same kind, contracts of another kind, and its users are programmed into.

Stable coins, as long as they are not the native currency of their own blockchain, are implemented as smart contracts, and so are NFTs or other tokens.

You could also implement a full election process within a smart contract, for example, or a vending machine.

3️⃣ About Its Syntax

Solidity is a curly brace language inspired by C, C++, JavaScript, and some Python. However, it still looks pretty different from those languages and has a unique touch to it.

You can see an example of a basic Solidity contract below. 👇🏻

Perhaps you have noticed that modifiers on functions are actually placed behind the parameter list of a function. This is one example of Solidity's different syntax.

Those modifiers have some pretty special meaning and are very important.

As writing to blockchains is transaction-based, you need to mark functions that alter the state of a contract and thus require a transaction accordingly. Functions that don't alter the state of a contract and thus don't require a transaction have to be marked, as well.

Other than the aforementioned, Solidity follows the C-standard of declaring variables with a leading type and the identifier after. It has loops, arrays, and anything else other languages also have.

You can see an example of a simple for-loop, below. 👇🏻

4️⃣ How To Get Started?

The easiest answer is sometimes the best: Start hacking!

Remix is an online Solidity IDE that allows you to get started without the need to install anything.

remix.ethereum.org

If you want to get deeper into Solidity and learn the language, I already compiled a list of resources that I found pretty valuable. Perhaps they are to you, as well!

https://twitter.com/oliverjumpertz/status/1390618414612455424

And if you think about how you could set up your Solidity development environment, look no further. I also wrote a thread about this!

https://twitter.com/oliverjumpertz/status/1391041199386079240