So it impacts the DAO and potentially impacts other deployed contracts (we don't know yet).

It's an issue with Solidity because it doesn't even do static analysis to give the programmar a warning.

It's not that programmers actively avoid doing this or are explicitly warned to not do it. When real money is at stake the language design needs to be a lot more careful.

So you think it's safer if used among "trusted contracts"?

Even if you wrote all the contracts that are interacting like this yourself, this is an immense source for bugs. As anyone with some experience in concurrent programming or OOP can tell you.

Communication between contracts should have been defined and done via channels.

Yeah, all this shadenfreude from people who (wrongly) predicted ethereum would never work, and who want to feel vindicated, is predictable but frustrating.

Not at all.

When I discovered ethereum a couple of years ago I thought it was a good idea. Partly because I was turning similar ideas in my head at the time.

But what I read now sounds like amateurs designed & implemented it. Sorry.

And if masters had invented it, no one would be using it.

Sure, ephemerum works in the same manner as Windows 98, Adobe Flash and sendmail.

So hugely popular beyond anything you or anyone you know has ever made?

Sure, Herbalife is also more popular than most things that diligent and intelligent persons have made.

Honestly, I was in awe by r/bitcoin's reaction to this whole DAO debacle. I thought that the whole Mt Gox "incident" has taught them some empathy to people losing money but I was very wrong.

Empathy? Bitcoiners? A large chunk of them are anarcho-capitalists who measure a person's right to survive by how much money they can make, and most of the rest are in it to make themselves rich. There's a fair few who are mostly in it just because it's cool tech, but they avoid Bitcoin forums now due to the former two groups.

Note that this covers most other cryptocurrencies as well.