I feel like the only elephant in the room with Haskell is that Haskell people are obsessed with jumping in on any other FP language and trying to turn it into Haskell. Scala was/is awash with it, much to the detriment of the community.
The Haskell Elephant in the Room
41–50 of 341 posts
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#42”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.
Anecdotally, almost every Haskell job posting I've ever seen is for a bank or some kind of cryptocurrency thing. I've never done a real analysis and I don't have any numbers to back that up, that's just what it feels like as someone who passively watches the Haskell job market.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#43Earlier 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?
Haskell isn't that large of a language. I'm not confident if the heavy usage by shady crpyto companies is enough to ruin the image of a language but I think at the very least the advice to not depend on it financially to grow the community is a sound one.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is touched upon in the text : "the Haskell community itself has simply become a tool to buy legitimacy and pump token values."
I was at a hackathon and this big shot legal person from NY was telling me about a hot crypto company and them using Haskell was like the first thing he told me. In fact, all he told me was they raised a bunch of money in an ICO and they use Haskell. And then he sat there waiting for me to be impressed
Middle-out block exchange gets you 2x the fees and 1/4 the confirmation latency.
Add in "and every dev gets dual monitors" and it would have been 1999.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I am not sure what is "alleged" about Haskell consultancies getting cryptocurrency money. It is pretty easy to confirm. Both Well-Typed and FP Complete got money from Cardano and posted to their blog what amount to advertisements for Cardano. Google a bit if you care.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#46> "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.
Economics is a science. You get an idea what's 'pseudo' or not by working in or familiarizing yourself with the field. Say, The New neoclassical synthesis is very much as standard as it gets, whereas Marxist or Austrian economics exist on the fringes.
In general something is pseudo-scientific if it operates outside of the formalisms or tools of that particular discipline, especially if it pretends that it does not.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I am not sure what is "alleged" about Haskell consultancies getting cryptocurrency money. It is pretty easy to confirm. Both Well-Typed and FP Complete got money from Cardano and posted to their blog what amount to advertisements for Cardano. Google a bit if you care.
"Alleged" as in "the article claims this, but I personally haven't double-checked it so don't want to make my post sound as I myself were sure this was the case". "Alleged" doesn't mean "unfounded".
I've written enough comments on HN to know that if I don't word it this way, someone will inevitably start arguing with me as if the assertion was mine.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#48There 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 cryptoc…
The "What is happening?" and "How is it happening?" sections of the article spend 900 words differentiating legal financial services from cryptocurrency scams.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#49What 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 prac…
That's not true... all turing complete type systems are unsound (where the type metalanguage itself is a turing complete language), but you can have a sound type system of a turing complete language, and in fact haskel itself has such a type system.
Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room
#50Earlier 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?
Worked at a Haskell crypto startup. Your analysis of cause and effect is wrong -- crypto people are attracted to Haskell because it has features that are excellent for the domain, not because they are interested in "copping shine" from it or whatever.