Midnight Network Is Building for the Millions of Developers Who Already Know JavaScript

There are about 17 million JavaScript programmers throughout the globe. That figure has been mentioned so frequently it has almost become background noise but it can have some real impact when one considers what it implies to a new technology that is struggling to find its footing. Any platform that can actually get close to such developers and use the patterns they already know, the mental models they have already developed, begins with an immense structural advantage. The question on blockchain has never ceased to exist whether blockchain can bridge that gap. The majority of networks are yet to be closed. The average developer experience of a developer transitioning to Web3 is being introduced to Solidity or Rust, learning how blockchain state functionality, adjusting to toolchains that do not even look like what they were used to, and being okay with the fact that most of the abstraction layers they are used to are not present here. To many developers, such an expense is prohibitive. It may be interesting technology. The use case may be convincing. However, once the learning curve is high, people have something else to construct. Talent does not travel into hard-to-work situations but rather into shippable situations. The programmers at @MidnightNetwork have created their own programming language named Compact, and the main concept of the language is as follows: developers do not need to leave the knowledge base to create privacy-protective smart contracts. Compact is written in a JavaScript-like syntax and familiar programming patterns, allowing the intellectual burden of transitioning to the ecosystem of a blockchain to Compact to be much smaller than what most blockchains require. You’re not starting from zero. You are elongating out of some place you have been. This is not merely a factor of convenience. With a familiar language developers may work on the problem being solved, as opposed to the tool being solved with. It is then that, interesting applications get built. The learning curve of entirely new paradigm does not only reduce the speed of the developers but also weeds out most of the developers who could have created something useful had the threshold been lower. Compact is an intentional effort to retain that kind of population to the room. The question is what Compact is really up to underneath that makes this more than a developer experience story. The language is designed to reduce to the ZK circuit layer of Midnight, and this implies that the developer can write surface level code and have the network work out the zero-knowledge proof generation behind the scenes. The privacy is not something to add later the infrastructure does the work of creating it as a byproduct of writing in Compact. The combination of that, which is the syntax that is already familiar and a cryptographic infrastructure that is in place and is taken as an abstraction is precisely the sort of abstraction that is likely to open new classes of builders. The token of $NIGHT , the Midnight, drives the network that these developers are constructing. The easier it is to construct a network on, the more valuable becomes the ecosystem around NIGHT. The connection between the accessibility of the developers and the long-term sustainability of any blockchain network is direct. Midnight appears to realize that well enough. The programmers who will ultimately make privacy-first applications will reach mainstream users are not necessarily all cryptographers. The vast majority of them are currently working in JavaScript, creating applications that have no relationship to blockchain, unaware that there exists a network that was created with them in mind partially. The first point that Compact is Midnight makes to that audience is that, it is evidence that you do not need to decide between using the same tools that you are familiar with, or using a technology that will protect users in reality. That would be an argument that gets lodged, and who comes to construct the next generation of the internet would be different. $NIGHT #night