DAML: Contract Language of Distributed Ledgers

Quite an interesting piece on contract languages and 'Smart Contracts".  A recent proposal made me look deeper into this idea, especially as it might connect to supply chain and procurement efficiencies.  Considerable 7-page piece, admittedly technical here, but worth taking a close look.  And of  course this gets to workflow, always a particular angle of interest of mine.  Below just a few excerpts.

Case Study
DAML: The Contract Language of Distributed Ledgers
A discussion between Shaul Kfir and Camille Fournier

When Shaul Kfir cofounded Digital Asset in 2014, he was out to prove something to the financial services industry. He saw it as being not only hamstrung by an inefficient system for transaction reconciliation, but also in danger of missing out on what blockchain technology could do to address its shortcomings.

Since then, Digital Asset has gone to market with its own distributed-ledger technology, DAML (Digital Asset Modeling Language). And that does indeed take advantage of blockchain—only not in quite the way Kfir had initially intended. He and Digital Asset ended up taking an engineering "journey" to get to where they are today.

Kfir readily admits his own background in cryptography and cryptocurrency—both as a researcher (at Technion and MIT) and as a cryptocurrency entrepreneur in Israel—had more than just a little to do with the course that was originally charted. As for lessons learned along the way, Camille Fournier, the head of platform development for a leading New York City hedge fund, helps to elicit those here. She brings to the exercise her own background in distributed-systems consensus (as one of the original committers to the Apache Zookeeper Project) and financial services (as a former VP of technology at Goldman Sachs).  ....  "

" .... To clarify, think about how large technology companies use their infrastructure to achieve greater agility. Most of them today have some logically centralized infrastructure that includes a central code repository and a CI/CD [continuous integration/continuous delivery] system. If these ideas can be expanded to an industry level in the sense that you can start rolling out workflows as smart contracts that are written only once and then made available for everyone to build upon, that's clearly more efficient than leaving it to each organization to write its own workflows. ... "