In Chapter 6 of Cardano for the Masses, this reader took a deep breath before diving into a 30 page exploration of Cardano’s smart contract programming language, Plutus. A “real programmer” (I am not) will doubtless understand more of this chapter than I did. However I believe that anyone with an interest in Cardano can learn valuable things by touring the full landscape. Aside from a cryptic quote on the chapter’s opening page about gold, the author didn’t address my burning question, which was “Why is it called Plutus?” So I googled it myself and learned that Plutus is the Greek god of wealth. With that out of the way, what did author Greene have to say about Plutus?

First came a helpful clarification; Cardano’s code is written in Haskell. Cardano has not one but two programming languages that have been created to work with it: Plutus and Marlowe. Both of these programming languages are based on Haskell.

Marlowe is a “domain-specific” language. Domain-specific simply means (I googled this too) that the language was developed and optimized to deal with a specific set of concerns. Marlowe was developed for building financial contracts - specifically and exclusively.

Plutus, then, is the…