It’s hard to talk about immutability in a vacuum. While I look forward to Eth 2.0 being a fresh start, eventually that too will become bogged down with technical debt. There was some talk maybe a year ago about a multi-tiered system to satisfy both the risk-tolerant and the risk-averse (whether it’s different rules for different shards or something else). Of course this brings additional complexity, of which there’s already no shortage.
I still find it profoundly stupid to consider gas cost invariant (and judging by how little code this pricing change broke, maybe most developers agree?). Hardware and expenses associated with hardware change every year and as a result so do the relative costs of memory vs CPU vs storage usage. Maybe language tools can do more to prevent us from relying on gas cost for program behavior. I wish information about gas was completely inaccessible to contracts so that they would be unable to branch on it. I don’t want my program doing different things based on how much power it’s getting from the wall. It should either have enough gas to complete or not. Ideally gas costs should be market-driven in real time and I hope there’s a way to get there eventually.
I was hoping that this year Ethereum would scale 10x in terms of ops/s. It seems increasingly unlikely given how seriously we treat de facto invariants such as gas cost and how every time we fork/upgrade it’s like we’re defusing a nuclear weapon. Like everyone else, I want to have my cake and eat it too. Maybe this means focusing on Layer 2.