Whoa, FP Complete is doing crypto? It never appeared to me like that. Is there a citation?
Sure they do. It really is a public secret. See https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/fp-complete-and-cardano-bloc...
The Haskell Elephant in the Room
21–30 of 341 posts
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#22"Haskell elephant" is such a missed portmanteau opportunity.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#23To 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?
Most people can read "unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector" as everything except bitcoin. A minority of people will read it as "all crypto", and if you're reading it as "only shitcoins" you're probably a little unsavoury yourself.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Maybe it’s about the metaphorical ed whom is neither an elephant nor responsible for crypto’s thirst....
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#25”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.
I'm not an expert and I don't do value judgments, but I think he's talking about something called 'smart contracts'.
Haskell would make it easier to verify smart contracts.
I thought he was talking about use cases like those as Cardano and with "some of the very founding contributors" he meant Philip Wadler (amongst others).
EDIT: didn't want to imply that Cardano is a shady company.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#26Very much a generic anti-cryptocurrency rant, and very little haskell-specific clarifications. I understand not wanting to name specific projects (Cardano comes to mind; " Cardano is a blockchain platform built on the groundbreaking Ouroboros proof-of-stake consensus protocol, and developed using the Haskell programming language: a functional programming language that enables Cardano to pursue evidence-based developm…
> very little haskell-specific clarifications
This is about Haskell-the-ecosystem, not Haskell-the-technology. In that way I think it's a valuable contribution.
Stephen is a well known and respected part of the Haskell ecosystem, and has written many popular blog posts about the language and ecosystem.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#27What 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.
> What is it about Haskell that makes it a hot candidate for use in cryptocurrency applications?
The community opinion is that Haskell is good for building robust and correctly behaving applications. There's some evidence that very strong type systems can help with this.
Financial software is an area where people typically want deep correctness guarantees, another good example area being cryptography.
Between these I think it's probably a good thing that crypto-currency applications and applications like exchanges are being built with "safe" technology like Haskell, rather than technologies that provide much less safety (many Ethereum hacks have boiled down to Solidity contracts being relatively loosely typed).
This is however not an opinion on what crypto is doing to the Haskell ecosystem. I don't know about that.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#28I've been concerned about this for Rust too, as a lot of the published jobs and high profile projects (including Libra) are in the cryptocurrency sector. For example, one of the most promising rival GUI toolkits, iced, is being sponsored by Cryptowatch. Fortunately, the growth of other sectors is robust enough that if all cryptocurrency were to fall into the ocean, Rust would be impacted but not massively so.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#29Very much a generic anti-cryptocurrency rant, and very little haskell-specific clarifications. I understand not wanting to name specific projects (Cardano comes to mind; " Cardano is a blockchain platform built on the groundbreaking Ouroboros proof-of-stake consensus protocol, and developed using the Haskell programming language: a functional programming language that enables Cardano to pursue evidence-based developm…
> very little haskell-specific clarifications
The author mentions at least three Haskell-related companies, such as FP Complete, and says he wants to avoid naming specific people for the time being.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#30Very much a generic anti-cryptocurrency rant, and very little haskell-specific clarifications. I understand not wanting to name specific projects (Cardano comes to mind; " Cardano is a blockchain platform built on the groundbreaking Ouroboros proof-of-stake consensus protocol, and developed using the Haskell programming language: a functional programming language that enables Cardano to pursue evidence-based developm…
> very little haskell-specific clarifications The author mentions at least three Haskell-related companies, such as FP Complete, and says he wants to avoid naming specific people for the time being.
If the only charge is that haskell consulting companies are writing code for cryptocurrency projects, then I have misunderstood the article first time around. I assumed the problem was with developments in the haskell language itself.