The Haskell Elephant in the Room • Hacker News Board

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#131

Post by mnsc » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #105

burkaman wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

Interesting that you brought up mathematics. My shallow view of the haskell community is that they think haskell is/should be as theoretically solid as mathematics. And based on this, my interpretation of the underlying fear in the article is analogous to the Russian government somehow duping all the world's mathematicians to only work on the problem domain of breaking cryptos (and incidentally primarily the type of cryptos used by "enemy" nations) and all the mathematicians dropping everything and going "yeah, that sound super cool let's do that, maybe someone else will pick up my work in combinatorial topography"

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#132

Post by yarrel » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

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.

"Legal financial services are bailed out by the state when they destroy the economy, cryptocurrencies don't do that" doesn't take 900 words.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#133

Post by mark_l_watson » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #26

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…

> very little haskell-specific clarifications This is about Haskell-the-ecosystem, not Haskell-the-technology. In that way I think it's a valuable contribution. Stephen is a well known and respected part of the Haskell ecosystem, and has written many popular blog posts about the language and ecosystem.

I agree. Cardano and Pact are fine projects.

Pact (a not complete Turing language for blockchain) is also interesting Haskell code to read and to learn from.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#134

Post by raphlinus » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

Macha wrote: post #124

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.

I think you're referring to: https://llogiq.github.io/2019/11/05/fear.html

ETA, and here's the discussion thread on the original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/dpakxq/rust_2020_more...

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#135

Post by chriswarbo » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

prionassembly wrote: post #37

danpalmer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The influx of money is toxic because Haskell's traditional reputation (roughly: difficult to learn, but fast, smart & correct) is being co-opted to add a veneer of legitimacy to crypto scams.

I also wouldn't say the problem is to do with "right wing people". Nobody's born with a political affiliation: we learn and digest information and experience all through our lives, swinging towards and away from different values at different times. This can especially depend on our social circles, our information-bubbles, what benefits us personally, etc.

The crypto-bubble tends to discourage regulation, accountability, etc. which makes it attractive to right-wing politics, whether as a libertarian free-for-all; or money-laundering for the gentry; or whatever. When this sector has an outsized influence on a particular community, the political gradient will be tilted accordingly, and bias people's random walks to the right.

Haskell may be great at solving the technical problems with crypto, but that doesn't solve its ethical or philosophical problems. Yet, as the old saying goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it".

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#136

Post by lsllc » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

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.

I would go as far as to say IBM was "complicit":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust#Summary

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#137

Post by tome » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

mnsc wrote: post #131

nine_k wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

Interesting that you brought up mathematics. My shallow view of the haskell community is that they think haskell is/should be as theoretically solid as mathematics. And based on this, my interpretation of the underlying fear in the article is analogous to the Russian government somehow duping all the world's mathematicians to only work on the problem domain of breaking cryptos (and incidentally primarily the type of…

Why the Russian government specifically? Plenty of nations do encourage this of (some of) their mathematicians and this practice is also poorly regarded by some.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#138

Post by apatheticnpc » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

Idk I think the haskell elephant in the room is the poor beginner and intermediate resources,poor tooling,lack of libraries and poor documentation but maybe that's just me people totally don't want to use haskell because it's involved in some cryptocurrency scams

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#139

Post by gmfawcett » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #129

gmfawcett wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would agree. :) Is that the case with Haskell? The OP only says that "some of the very founding contributors to Haskell itself" are deeply involved in this.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#140

Post by gmfawcett » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

crb002 wrote: post #87

Does Haskell have a legible GC free subset that is an alternative to Rust? If not, that is the elephant.

I'm not sure you understand what "elephant in the room" means? The fact that Haskell has a GC is not an uncomfortable truth that everyone avoids discussing.