What is Solidity? Should I learn Solidity to do Blockchain?

What is Solidity? What are the advantages and disadvantages of Solidity programming language? Why are so many people going to learn Solidity programming nowadays?

Solidity is one of the programming languages used to build applications on Ethereum and the EVM chain. In today’s article, we will learn what Solidity is, how they work and its pros and cons.

What is Solidity?

Solidity is a programming language for building smart contracts on Ethereum. It is considered a leading decentralized smart contract platform in crypto.

Basically, anything that can be built on centralized systems can be built on Ethereum, from decentralized exchanges (DEXs), digital art markets (NFTs), financial Decentralized Main (DeFi), Metaverse,…

Solidity is a high-level programming language, the audience of Solidity language is programmers who want to develop applications on Ethereum. By using a combination of letters and numbers, the Solidity programming language makes it easier for developers to write programs.

After being proposed in 2014 by Gavin Wood, the language has been developed by contributors to the Ethereum project, led by Christian Reitwiessner, Vitalik Buterin, Alex Beregszaszi and others.

Learn more: What is a Smart Contract?

What is Solidity programming language?

How Solidity Works on Ethereum

As I mentioned above, Solidity programming language is used to create smart contracts on Ethereum, it allows for many different use cases such as:

• Mint the Fungible, Non-Fungible token (NFT).
• Create decentralized lending markets for Fungible tokens: Compound, Aave,…
• Create non-Fungible token exchange markets: Opensea, SuperRare,…

After developers use Solidity to write programs, one of the important components that help execute Solidity Code is the EVM. EVM is described as a virtual computer on the blockchain, it helps turn developers’ solidity code into applications running on Ethereum.

At a higher level, Solidity allows developers to write “machine level” code that can be executed on the EVM. The compiler is then used to break down the lines of code that the developers write, turning it into instructions that the processor can understand and execute.

To better understand the concept, characteristics and operation mechanism of EVM, please refer to: What is EVM?

Advantages & Disadvantages of Solidity language

Despite being one of the most popular languages used to write blockchain applications, Solidity is like any other programming language, Solidity comes with its advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages & Disadvantages of Solidity programming language

Advantages

Solidity enables the construction of secure, transparent and trusted smart contracts. If implemented properly, they can increase operational efficiency, reduce administrative costs and reliance on third parties.

Solidity uses a large number of Programming Perceptions that exist in other programming languages such as variables, string manipulation, classes, functions, arithmetic operations, etc.

This is because Solidity is mainly influenced by C++, Python, JavaScript, so if you know a language like Java or C, your process of learning and using Solidity will be relatively easy.

Solidity is one of the most popular blockchain programming languages today for Ethereum and EVM chain, it provides quite a lot of open source documentation on how applications work and various use cases, from there, you can easily build more complex applications out of other people’s products.

For example, if you are building your own DEX, you can completely fork the source code of Uniswap and build more innovative features on top of it such as adding Liquidity Farming, Lending, etc.

Defect

Immutability is a great advantage, but in some cases can be a disadvantage. For example, once the contract is done, it cannot be upgraded, additional features cannot be added to it.

Because Ethereum runs on Blockchain technology, it cannot collect and update information quickly into the system except through transactional operations. This can be a big problem when it comes to factors like volatility data like the price of currency pairs (Forex),…

Learn more: Properties of Blockchain technology

The biggest downside that can be seen from Solidity is that it is young (when compared to older languages like C or Java). For developers, this means there can be very few libraries and references, making learning Solidity a daunting task for newbies.

Should I learn Solidity?

In Blockchain Developer, Solidity Dev seems to be the group with the highest demand, because Solidity is a programming language used to build applications in Ethereum and EVM chain, Solidity can be considered as a blockchain programming language recognized most used today.

If you are thinking about learning Solidity to aim for a job in the future web3 world, I think Solidity is also a language you should prioritize to learn, because:

• Ethereum has been growing for several years. So the learning material, the use cases have been explored quite a lot (compare with coswasm, !ink,…), which is very helpful in your learning process.
• The Ethereum & EVM chain ecosystem is the largest and most developed in the Crypto space, so the opportunity for growth will be huge.

Summary

So they learned what Solidity is? How it works and the pros and cons of Solidity. If you have other questions related to the above topic, please comment below for Idolmeta.net to support right away!