Cardano Blockchain Meetup Berlin #002

It’s about time for the next (more technical) meetup!
This time we verified the reservation in the Room77 on 22nd of August from 7-9 pm. Some of us might stay longer, like last time, so feel free to stick around for Cardano and blockchain flavored discussions!

Snacks, beer on tap and crypto payments are available for you to try and enjoy!

Please bring a smile, an open mind and at least 2 hours of your precious time for inspiring discussions and valuable presentations.

We’re thrilled and honored to have three very special guests, offering us their time and attention!

From IOHK: Dr. Manuel Chakravarty, blockchain language architect and Haskell Developer, as well as Darko Mijic, senior front end developer and Daedalus team manager.

From Cardano Foundation: General Secretary Hinrich Pfeifer.
He will give us a short intro on how he and the Cardano Foundation is driving the Cardano project.

Manuel will be giving a presentation about the science based development approach and the use of functional programming in general. See „Presentation Background Information“ below for further details.

Dr. Manuel Chakravarty
Manuel M T Chakravarty is a Language Architect at IOHK. He holds a doctoral degree from Technische Universität Berlin and published extensively on programming languages, compilers, and high-performance computing. He contributed to both the design and implementation of the Haskell programming language as well as several Haskell tools and open source libraries. He used to be an Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney, but with the increasing adoption of functional programming in industry, he shifted his focus to unlocking new application areas for functional programming and helping development teams reap the benefits of modern programming language technology. He is co-leading the research-driven Plutus smart contract language team at IOHK.

Manuel Bio https://iohk.io/team/manuel-chakravarty/
Manuel on Twitter https://twitter.com/TacticalGrace
Manuel On „The Cardano Effect“ on YT https://www.youtube.com/c/thecardanoeffect

Presentation Background information:
With the proliferation of blockchain designs, we see a proliferation of proposals for languages and systems to script the rules governing transactions on these blockchains, generally known as smart contract languages. Despite the name, these languages are usually fairly conventional programming languages used to impose constraints on the transactions permitted to transfer assets and manipulate data stored on the blockchain.

Given the high financial stakes and widely publicised weaknesses and exploits of first generation (Bitcoin) and second generation (Ethereum) blockchains, the third-generation Cardano blockchain places a strong emphasis on being sustainable and on a development methodology underpinned by scientific research, formal methods, and functional programming. This includes a new approach to contract languages based on state-of-the art research in programming languages and the increased safety provided by functional programming. The benefits of functional programming go even further: instead of having to invent yet another custom language, we simply use Haskell for the job.

In this talk, I will explain how Cardano distinguishes itself from other blockchains and why this is important if we care about sustainability and safety. I will discuss the role that scientific research plays in the development and how we go from research results to production code.