Smart contracts aren’t actually new. Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994 (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask).
Old problems seem to keep coming back. Bret Victor gave a talk in 2013 called “The Future of Programming,” where he talked about problems from 1973 that were still relevant.
To learn more about the Agoric blockchain, check out their homepage.
If you’d rather shape how the blockchain itself operates, much of Agoric’s code is open source.