What is Ride Programming Language (Waves)?

Ride is a functional programming language built to develop decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts on the Waves platform. Ride was constructed to address many of the most prominent shortcomings of other smart contract programming languages. To help facilitate the smart contract development process, Ride uses three main types of scripts to create different types of smart contracts including dApp scripts, account scripts, and asset scripts. Through Ride, accounts with scripts assigned to them become dApps or smart accounts while an asset with a script becomes a smart asset. This process differs from the development process often used with traditional programming languages like JavaScript, C, C++, and others.