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The Haskell Elephant in the Room

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#121

Post by agumonkey »

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.

the morality and potentially negative effects of finance are real but if Haskell wants a gold-niche to appear worthy for the mainstream world then it's a very potent one.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#122

Post by dpc_pw »

When your language is so tiny and unpopular that a growth of couple of small projects in an industry your don't like can overshadow the whole existing community...

If you create neutral open source tool like a programming language, you have to be OK with people using it to do stuff that you don't approve of.

And also, it's OK to have your own opinion about something and share it, but in complex matters you have to admit that there's a possibility that you're wrong. I think TSLA and a some other money losing overhyped companies are a FED-induced bubble, terrible investment etc. but so far it works for people who invest in them, so maybe I am wrong, and who am I to make decisions for other people anyway?

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#123

Post by SkyMarshal »

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…

Does anyone have any notion of what language decisions might be affected, especially for the worse, by factoring cryptocurrency considerations into it?

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#124

Post by Macha »

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.

There was definitely a minor controversy one year where a well known community figure listed "less cryptocurrency" as part of their hopes for Rust in one of the "Rust in $year" posts. Sadly I can't find the details right now.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#125

Post by rkangel »

nine_k wrote: post #108
Thomashuet wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

Quality of a language's community does affect the experience of using it. PHP is great example to use though - just because people are doing nefarious things doesn't make them unpleasant people.

The difference between this and the PHP case is one of economics. Economic input gives you influence (usually). If people who's approach to life you don't agree with assume influence over the direction of a project, that can be a source of worry.

I'm not sure I think it would be in this case, I think a source of finance is probably going to outweigh it, but I see the logic.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#126

Post by syrrim »

nine_k wrote: post #108
Thomashuet wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

>the author has taken his whole huge blog offline

Look again

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#127

Post by akimball »

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.

Being associated with broad-brush slander is also a negative. The attack on cryptocurrency broadly was extremely unbalanced, and not even factually correct on some pivotal points. I concede that it a sector rife with opportunism, scammers, and obvious criminal fraud. The core premise that the creation of an economy and system of trade, the codification of contract law in code, is without fundamental value or productive effect is, however, risible, and tightly coupling cryptocurrency with right-wing nuttery is a smear.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#128

Post by codemac »

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 know dfinity was a big one, they had a huge ICO and lots of haskellers.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#129

Post by wmf »

gmfawcett wrote: post #103
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.)

The question would be what fraction of the OCaml community is paid by Tezos. If it's over half you may have a problem.
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