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I'm trying to understand the design decisions behind Michelson and I'm in the process of evaluating if I should be writing my dapp in the Tezos blockchain.
What type of benefits does Michelson have over other smart contract languages(say compared to Ethereum's solidity)? What problems is it designed to solve and why should a developer choose Michelson?
Michelson lets you write concise contracts using high level primitives (like maps, sets) without departing from Tezos' native VM. That means you don't have to trust your contract to the output of a compiler. What you see is what is executed on chain. In addition, it is purely functional and statically typed, attributes which generally help developers avoid introducing bugs.
The main benefits of Michelson are the guarrantees that it gives on the execution of a smart contract : static typing catches many errors, and the semantics is clearly defined, so you have no surprise at execution.
Yes, Michelson is a low-level language, you should aim at a higher-level language, like Liquidity (http://www.liquidity-lang.org/), that compiles to Michelson.
