The Haskell Elephant in the Room
stephendiehl.com
The Haskell Elephant in the Room
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Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#2It's not just a Haskell problem, but I think that Haskellers would rather care about stuff like cryptocurrency, which is obviously unctuous graft, rather than fix the other social problems in their community, like sexism or overly-strict versioning.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#3What is it about Haskell that makes it a hot candidate for use in cryptocurrency applications? Can someone here shed some light? Read the article but it mostly seems to be a diatribe against crypto on philosophical grounds. I wish it were meatier on the technical reasons for this alleged relationship between Haskell and crypto industry.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#4To someone not familiar with Haskell funding, can anybody explain the quote below?
"For a while it has been a public secret the Haskell ecosystem has become increasingly entangled with an unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector as one of primary mechanisms for funding development."
I mean, what exactly is this "unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector" and how is Haskell tied to it?
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#5To someone not familiar with Haskell funding, can anybody explain the quote below? "For a while it has been a public secret the Haskell ecosystem has become increasingly entangled with an unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector as one of primary mechanisms for funding development." I mean, what exactly is this "unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector" and how is Haskell tied to it?
If you write Haskell and want a job, most of the positions available are with crypto related companies.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#6What is it about Haskell that makes it a hot candidate for use in cryptocurrency applications? Can someone here shed some light? Read the article but it mostly seems to be a diatribe against crypto on philosophical grounds. I wish it were meatier on the technical reasons for this alleged relationship between Haskell and crypto industry.
There's no actual technical reason. People fell into this as typesafe = "code must safe & secure". Its also a difficult language to understand unless you've trained under it compared to others. There's an innate obfuscation as a result.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#7What is it about Haskell that makes it a hot candidate for use in cryptocurrency applications? Can someone here shed some light? Read the article but it mostly seems to be a diatribe against crypto on philosophical grounds. I wish it were meatier on the technical reasons for this alleged relationship between Haskell and crypto industry.
There’s a deep connection between Types and Logical Proofs (Curry Howard Correspondence). Haskell has a rich type system that allows you to “prove” (i.e. typecheck) many properties of your program. This is valuable when getting right the first time is important such as smart contracts. I put prove in quotations because all type systems of Turing complete languages are unsound, but this doesn’t matter too much in practice. If you wanted to be really sure, you’d use a total language like Idris or Coq.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#8What is it about Haskell that makes it a hot candidate for use in cryptocurrency applications? Can someone here shed some light? Read the article but it mostly seems to be a diatribe against crypto on philosophical grounds. I wish it were meatier on the technical reasons for this alleged relationship between Haskell and crypto industry.
Haskell always struck me as a language you'd want to use to feel superior to the people who code in JS and python, and crypto always struck me as a field you'd want to work in to feel superior to the people who work in industries that actually generate profits.
Also, another possible reason is that many crypto people tend to confuse complexity with ingenuity. While the bitcoin whitepaper tries to make a complex topic as simple as possible, a great many crypto companies and people purposely use language that is needlessly convoluted and verbose.
Perhaps they're doing it on purpose to seem smarter?
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#9To someone not familiar with Haskell funding, can anybody explain the quote below? "For a while it has been a public secret the Haskell ecosystem has become increasingly entangled with an unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector as one of primary mechanisms for funding development." I mean, what exactly is this "unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector" and how is Haskell tied to it?
If you write Haskell and want a job, most of the positions available are with crypto related companies.
This sheds some light on the topic - thanks. Still, the author states that Haskell's reputation is used to legitimize bad business. It seems to me that shady companies using the language internally is not enough to raise alarm about it.
Is there some kind of (un-)official sponsorship from (supposedly) shady actors?
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#10”For a while it has been a public secret the Haskell ecosystem has become increasingly entangled with an unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector as one of primary mechanisms for funding development.”
And those would be? I code in Haskell every day and I have no idea what he’s talking about.