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The Haskell Elephant in the Room

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#51

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.

In addition to iced, I need to point out that Debian's Rust packaging is effectively funded by Web3 Foundation. Cryptocurrency money also funded RustCon Asia (held in Beijing).

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#52

Post by moomin »

anaphor wrote: post #31

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 cryptoc…

I mean, you ask a lot of questions, but the first one is answered by the article and the others aren't really that important given the answer to the first.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#53

Post by moomin »

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…

https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/2231

is an example.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#54

Post by anaphor »

pushcx wrote: post #48
anaphor wrote: post #31

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 cryptoc…

The "What is happening?" and "How is it happening?" sections of the article spend 900 words differentiating legal financial services from cryptocurrency scams.

I disagree with the idea that traditional legal financial services commit less fraud than cryptocurrency scams do. They just get away with it easier.

> Normally these frauds are recognized for what they are quite quickly and the courts and regulatory bodies can clean up the mess and rectify the damages to those who have been misled

That just comes off as total BS to me. How many regular people were awarded damages after the 2008 meltdown, which was due to massive fraud in the mortgage industry?

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#55

Post by derriz »

ogogmad wrote: post #39
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.

Given by whom? Economics is regarded as one of the major social sciences.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#56

Post by analyte123 »

twat wrote: post #16
pyb wrote: post #12

Earlier 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

Every company that has the ability to do this as a recruiting tool will do it. We're using Elixir / we're using OCaml / we're using Clojure (we're using NLP / we're using ML). In every case there will be some "business" guy who understands just enough to try to impress some potential recruit. If you don't understand the domain and their actual usage of the tool or language enough to fall for this and not ask further questions, it's kind of a problem on your part.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#57

Post by bodhiandpysics1 »

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.

There is a certain class of computer programs that can best be described as a really big table. Basically, an input taken from a finite set, you get an output taken from a finite set. This type of program is really easy to write in Haskel because you can prove that both the conplete input set and output set are covered using the type system. In other words you can prove that you deal with every possible case (though you can't prove that you deal with every possible case correctly!!!), and that there is no ambiguity (one input has multiple correct outputs) A good example of such a program is an insurance contract (or a derivitive contract in a bank)

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#58

Post by leshow »

Mentions FP Complete, who worked on cardano I think. So is the accusation that cardano is running a shady exchange and stealing from people?

I don't follow the crypto space, but it seems like we might actually want to know which companies are being accused of being shady.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#60

Post by sanxiyn »

moomin wrote: post #53
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…

https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/2231 is an example.

Key word here is Asterius. Cardano is funding Asterius, Haskell to WebAssembly compiler, Asterius is based on GHC, and changes convenient for Asterius are being merged to GHC.
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