plutarch-plutus VS plutus-pioneer-program

Plutarch (IP) - https://github.com/Plutonomicon/plutarch-plutus : Plutarch is a typed eDSL in Haskell for writing efficient Plutus Core validators.

Plutarch - Smart Contract Optimization for production (https://github.com/Plutonomicon/plutarch-plutus)

Also, I'd say Plutus is more complicated than Haskell, but only b/c there are so many counter-intuitive ways to do things. A big part of the problem is performance; we use tools like Plutarch to minimize overhead, but it still ends up being a problem.

I'm pretty sure that the good dApps will optimize their code to make transaction size as small as possible. This will directly lead to lower fees or more revenue for the dApp. Many dApps are already using Plutarch to reduce transaction size. It's pretty cool that Plutarch has emerged from the Cardano community and not IOHK.

-Plutarch v1.1 released https://github.com/Plutonomicon/plutarch

If you want an easy entry into Plutus and Cardano smart contracts take a look at https://demeter.run/ and plutus pioneer program cohort 4 content

and the course materials, including assignments and HW are updated weekly here: https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-pioneer-program

Step Three: learn Plutus. Check out the Plutus Pioneer Program.

GitHub repo

There's a little more to it than cloning an existing repo and installing it somewhere. I think the very first thing you should do is go through the pioneers program. https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-pioneer-program