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The Haskell Elephant in the Room

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#101

Post by nine_k »

ajuc wrote: post #90
nine_k wrote: post #86

I think this is a rather strange way of thinking. Fortran has been extensively used for nuclear weapons development. Let's stay away from Fortran! C was and is widely used in weapons control systems. Let's stop using C! Computers themselves were initially designed for artillery fire control, with an explicit intention of killing people. Let's not touch the technology with such a foul pedigree. This can be continued a…

IBM helped with Holocaust. It also invented PC.

Werner von Braun bombed London with V-2s during WWII and was a Nazi party member above the rank-and-file level.

Werner von Braun has lead the US space program to launching humans to LEO, and then to the Moon.

Again, technology is morally oblivious. A sword that only serves a noble aim is strictly the stuff of fairy tales, and is not implementable in the real world (no, not even with an AGI, since humans are a reasonably good approximation of an AGI).

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#103

Post by gmfawcett »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #88

If you have ethical concerns with this, but still love FP, just come over to OCaml. You get 80-90% of what you love about Haskell, and there is an established industry in many sectors. Big players here like Ahrefs, Jane Street, and, of course, Messanger and Facebook.

Tezos uses Ocaml; doesn't the same argument apply? (I don't agree with the argument, personally, and I'm a big fan of Ocaml... I just don't see how it deserves an "ethical concern" exception here.)

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#104

Post by nine_k »

frank2 wrote: post #99
ajuc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM helped with Holocaust. It also invented PC.

If you're trying to say that IBM invented the home computer or the personal computer, you are off by about 6 years. (Home computers became available around 1975; home computers that didn't not need any assembly by the buyer became available in 1976 or 1977; the IBM PC became available in 1981.) If you're trying to say that IBM was the first to officially name a personal computer "PC", I'll give you that one.

It did create a personal computer which was (1) easy to clone and (2) easy to extend with ISA cards. This openness made it a huge success, leading to an explosion of PC-compatible machines.

Most other makers, from Apple to Amiga, vigorously protected their small private markets where they dominated. The original Macintosh has explicitly removed all the expansion capabilities that e.g. Apple II had.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#105

Post by nine_k »

burkaman wrote: post #93
nine_k wrote: post #86

I think this is a rather strange way of thinking. Fortran has been extensively used for nuclear weapons development. Let's stay away from Fortran! C was and is widely used in weapons control systems. Let's stop using C! Computers themselves were initially designed for artillery fire control, with an explicit intention of killing people. Let's not touch the technology with such a foul pedigree. This can be continued a…

I realize the article is very vaguely written, but I don't think the argument is "Haskell has been used for cryptocurrency and that taints it forever." I read it as "A significant portion of jobs and funding in the Haskell ecosystem come from cryptocurrency organizations, giving them a lot of influence over the future of the language and the community." It's about who controls development of the tool right now , not…

Can mathematics be developed for nefarious purposes?

What kind of taint the current influence of the crypto-currency industry could leave on the technical side of the language?

If these guys are toxic within the development community, then, well, we have to somehow handle it — but again, we've seen highly prolific and highly toxic OSS contributors who wielded very different, "more noble" values, in the past. The problem may be the attitude, not the industry affiliation.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#106

Post by unicornmama »

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.

I suspect that’s because of the crypto boom. New tech is adopted by new startups, many (maybe even most) new startups are in the crypto space.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#107

Post by xg15 »

nine_k wrote: post #86

I think this is a rather strange way of thinking. Fortran has been extensively used for nuclear weapons development. Let's stay away from Fortran! C was and is widely used in weapons control systems. Let's stop using C! Computers themselves were initially designed for artillery fire control, with an explicit intention of killing people. Let's not touch the technology with such a foul pedigree. This can be continued a…

Nope. This is a call to the Haskell developer community to stop cooperation with crypto projects, not a general call to stop using Haskell.

I.e., it's a call to the knife makers to stop making their knifes to the specs of mob bosses, not a call to ban knifes.

There are plenty of precedents for this kind of action, e.g. pharmaceutical companies refusing to supply chemicals for executions. (If were already going all life-and-death with the analogies)

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#108

Post by nine_k »

Thomashuet wrote: post #94
nine_k wrote: post #86

I think this is a rather strange way of thinking. Fortran has been extensively used for nuclear weapons development. Let's stay away from Fortran! C was and is widely used in weapons control systems. Let's stop using C! Computers themselves were initially designed for artillery fire control, with an explicit intention of killing people. Let's not touch the technology with such a foul pedigree. This can be continued a…

I think you're misunderstanding the author here. He doesn't argue that people shouldn't use Haskell because it's used in crypto currencies, quite the opposite he seems to love Haskell and want people to use it. His worry is that being associated with crooks will make the Haskell community less attractive.

My point is exactly that: a technology itself can't be tainted by crooks using it.

Have innumerable script kiddies, scammers, doorway site creators, etc, used PHP for doing bad things? Did / do they constitute a significant part of the user community? Yes.

Has PHP been used to create wonderful and world-changing things, like Wikipedia? Does PHP have great, very nicely designed tools that help people develop good things faster, like Laravel? Has the PHP community done a tremendous work to make the language much better, and its stdlib much nicer? Yes.

Crooks using your favorite tool can be a nuisance in the community, but noble-intentioned people can be jerks, too, which has many times been observed. If the community has a problem with its being nice, welcoming, constructive place, it's usually not because of people's business and even political affiliation.

I'll hazard to link to [1] as a supplementary reading on the topic.

[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GLMFmFvXGyAcG25ni/i-can-tole... (It's a copy; unfortunately the author has taken his whole huge blog offline.)

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#109

Post by frank2 »

nine_k wrote: post #104
frank2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're trying to say that IBM invented the home computer or the personal computer, you are off by about 6 years. (Home computers became available around 1975; home computers that didn't not need any assembly by the buyer became available in 1976 or 1977; the IBM PC became available in 1981.) If you're trying to say that IBM was the first to officially name a personal computer "PC", I'll give you that one.

It did create a personal computer which was (1) easy to clone and (2) easy to extend with ISA cards. This openness made it a huge success, leading to an explosion of PC-compatible machines. Most other makers, from Apple to Amiga, vigorously protected their small private markets where they dominated. The original Macintosh has explicitly removed all the expansion capabilities that e.g. Apple II had.

It accidentally made it easy to clone by rushing to market, making false assumptions and hoping the enterprise market would soon lose interest in personal computers.

Rushing to market led to the decision to license the OS from Bill Gates instead of buying the OS or writing it in-house.

An example of a false assumption would be believing that holding the copyright on the BIOS would be enough prevent clones.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#110

Post by rsstack »

sanxiyn wrote: post #80
akyu wrote: post #70

"Adjoint Treasury is a real-time payments and settlement platform for corporate treasury" Stephen Diehl CTO and Founder at Adjoint I feel our author may not be entirely impartial here...

I am not sure what you are trying to imply.

I think the implication is "old school financial institutions don't like cryptocurrencies because they will make them obsolete".

so don't agree with the statement or the implication that it's relevant, but I think that's what the person above meant.

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