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The Haskell Elephant in the Room

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#31

Post by anaphor »

There are also a lot of traditional finance companies using Haskell[1]. And, historically some of the people who created the language itself and have worked on GHC (and other compilers), or contributed heavily to the ecosystem have worked for traditional banks[2].

I don't mention them to encourage people to attack these people, but it comes off as a bit selective to focus on the people using your language for cryptocurrency when it's also used heavily by traditional fintech companies, as well as defense contractors, and even for large retail chains (Target uses it for data analysis). Facebook also uses it for their spam detection system. Why are all of these uses fine and cryptocurrency is not? And if they also aren't fine, then how should we solve this problem? Start non-profits/charities that specifically use Haskell, and somehow make those the majority of the available jobs that use it? That seems pretty infeasible unless you want to solve the broader problem of these jobs existing in the first place.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/6p2x0p/list_of_com... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Augustsson, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekmett/, https://stackoverflow.com/users/83805/don-stewart

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#32

Post by drcode »

bondarchuk wrote: post #11

Very 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…

It doesn't work to talk about an "elephant in the room" and then not name names. The whole point of the idiom is that you're criticizing other people for not concretely naming things.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#33

Post by the_af »

I knew Stephen Diehl rang a bell! He is the author of this very useful primer on tools & basics of the Haskell dev environment: "What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell"(http://dev.stephendiehl.com/hask/). I recommend it as a practical overview, though of course it doesn't replace actually learning Haskell.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#35

Post by the_af »

bondarchuk wrote: post #30
the_af wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Exactly this. The article is not about the Haskell language itself -- i.e. not a rant about technical issues -- but about its community and consulting companies getting (allegedly) entangled with crypto businesses. "Making a deal with the devil".

That's why the author rants about crypto and not about Haskell itself.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#36

Post by declnz »

dtseng123 wrote: post #5
praptak wrote: post #4

To 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.

I'm not sure where you are - but that's not true in London (source: been working here a long time, plus have been hiring for Haskell recently)

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#37

Post by prionassembly »

danpalmer wrote: post #27
hannofcart wrote: post #3

What 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…

Apparently there's "right wing" people in Haskell now. This is such a paper thin threat on unspecified persons who must know they're being targeted.

Seriously, I don't think the readership of HN is in any disagreement about how new cryptocurrencies are "short long con" jobs, but the author teases that the influx of this money is toxic to the Haskell community because... right wing people?

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#38

Post by LargeWu »

markhollis wrote: post #25
alexmingoia wrote: post #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.

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.

No, he's not talking about the technical features of blockchain. He's talking about the general shadiness of a nontrivial number of actors in the cryptocurrency sector itself, which have had a propensity for deceptive marketing, and even outright fraud.

His concern is that if Haskell gets the reputation of being beholden to these interests it will make the Haskell ecosystem undesirable to legitimate actors.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#39

Post by ogogmad »

prionassembly wrote: post #34

> "what economists call non-productive assets" That's not a technical term nor a "term of art" in economics. Google Scholar returns results from management and accounting journals, as well as some pseudo-economics ("heterodox") pamphlets.

How do you know what's "pseudo" and not "pseudo" in economics? Given that it isn't a science. I'm genuinely curious.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#40

Post by sanxiyn »

raphlinus wrote: post #28

I'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.

Rust's adoption in the cryptocurrency sector is massive indeed. Parity Technologies and OpenEthereum is the most well known, but both Stellar Development Foundation and Zcash Foundation (both are among top 30 cryptocurrencies) are rewriting their main node implementation in Rust. I'd say at this point Rust has more adoption than both Haskell (Cardano) and OCaml (Tezos).
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