Wren is going to be a pretty important part of EOS adoption. A simple scripting language like Wren is going to let many more people write code for the blockchain. Unlike complex (or different, however you want to word it) languages like Ocaml - to be used by the upcoming project Tezos - Wren is very simple and intuitive. While Ocaml, a functional language, may provide many guarantees of contract code safety, it is a paradigm shift for many programmers.
With the space moving toward a polychain future, there is a place for both projects. There will be a spectrum of applications with a spectrum of security requirements - these will dictate what platform the app will run on. Wren positions EOS in the mass market, easy to use part of that spectrum. There will be users who want the security and formal verification of functional languages.
Will have to give that demo a go, the Mandelbrot looks pretty.
I remember hearing Dan talk about the difference between his approach and the approach many others take. Instead of trying to make code "perfect" or building in error checking into every single step of the process, he prefers error detection and recovery. To many pure programmers of the academic type, this sounds like sacrilege!
To me, it sounds great. I've always been a pragmatic programmer and I appreciate that code is never perfect. Code can be great, useful, even excellent, but it can't be perfect. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. The approach, as I understand it, is to have validation in the beginning and then, once it's been validated and added to the blockchain, ignored. Since it's already validated data, everyone else just needs to replay it, not validate it again. That makes a lot of sense to me. I also like how things can be shut down (like individual apps) without disrupting the entire blockchain.
Tezos sounds interesting, but I kind of feel like it's trying for perfection when the real world is quite messy. Businesses involve humans and humans are messy. I'm signed up to the mailing list, but I don't know much more about it at this point.
I think the mentality you have over code is very healthy. I think there is a place in this space for both types of blockchain. DPOS already has some trade offs when compared to other consensus methods. I think there is a place for functional programming and the benefits it brings to the table. It will be interesting to see how the space evolves as more applications arive.