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Domain specific language

Marlowe is a domain-specific language (DSL) that you can use to create blockchain applications specifically designed for financial contracts. Marlowe allows you to apply your domain expertise to write and manage contracts conveniently, without the steep learning curve associated with software development, blockchain, or smart contracts.

Advantages of using the Marlowe language​

Beyond the notable benefit of being usable by non-programmers, the Marlowe language has many other advantages:

  • Ensures that certain sorts of flawed programs cannot even be written by designing those possibilities out of the language.
  • Avoids some of the unanticipated exploits that have been a problem for existing blockchains.
  • More easily checks that programs have the intended properties.
  • High assurance that the contract consistently fulfills its payment obligations.
  • Helps people write programs in the language using special-purpose tools.
  • Emulates how a contract will behave before it is run for real on the blockchain, ensuring that the contract performs as intended through static analysis.
  • Provides valuable diagnostics to potential participants before they commit to a contract.
  • Formally proves properties of Marlowe contracts, giving the highest level of assurance that contracts behave as intended through using logic tools.

Embedded DSL​

Marlowe is an embedded DSL, hosted in TypeScript, JavaScript, and Haskell, offering you a choice of editors depending on your preference and skill set.

TypeScript and JavaScript offer flexibility and speed of use with a thriving ecosystem, while Haskell is a functional programming language with its own established ecosystem and solid testing framework.

While it is possible to use "pure" Marlowe if you wish, being embedded in a general-purpose language allows contract writers to selectively exploit features of TypeScript or Haskell in writing Marlowe contracts, making them easier to read and reuse.

Marlowe's implementation ("under the hood") is in Plutus. For further details about Plutus, please see:

Putting Marlowe in perspective -- general purpose programming languages v DSL​

The first computers were programmed in "machine code." Each kind of system used a different code, and these codes were low level and inexpressive: programs were long sequences of very simple instructions, incomprehensible to anyone who had not written them.

Today we are able to use higher-level languages like C, Java, and Haskell to program systems. The same languages can be used on widely different machines, and the structure of the programs reflects what they do.

On blockchain, their equivalents are languages like Plutus, Solidity, and Simplicity. These higher-level languages are general purpose -- they can be used to solve all sorts of different problems -- but the solutions they express are still programs, and they still require programming skills to use them effectively.