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The Haskell Elephant in the Room

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#161

Post by nine_k »

fwip wrote: post #155
nine_k wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reasona…

Technology is not inherently morally oblivious. Some technology has only one purpose, and is used only for immoral acts. An example of this would be any device invented for torture. While those examples are uncommon, more technology is built expressly for evil acts, even if it has the capacity for good. If you are distributing plans and technology to make "dirty bombs" - devices intended to disperse lethal amounts of…

The same firearm can be user to assault an innocent person and to protect an innocent person (in the hands of said person or law enforcement / army).

There are certain devices, like napalm bombs, that have a narrow and specific purpose of destruction. But the technologies used to make the bomb shells or the napalm are not specific, and have all kinds of peaceful and constructive uses.

Equally, there can be bad, evil-pursuing programs in a particular general purpose language, but this does not taint that language.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#162

Post by gwbas1c »

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…

> Painfully, some of the very founding contributors to Haskell itself are the ones deepest involved in this ring

The author's point is the opposite. He's calling out prominent members of the Haskell community for running cryptocurrency schemes.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#163

Post by fwip »

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…

Tools are not inherently morally neutral, and I wish that people would stop repeating this lie.

Slot machines are expressly designed to feed on a person's gambling addiction and to take their money. Dirty bombs are designed to murder thousands or millions of innocent civilians. The Nazi gas chambers were designed to slaughter millions of innocent civilians.

Using a programming language benefits that programming language. This is pretty transparently obvious - a larger community means more skilled professionals, more support on stack overflow, more funding for development, and more open-source contributions.

If you strongly believe that the crypto-currency people are doing evil, it makes sense not to aid them. Whether "using Haskell" is worth worrying about is something for individuals to decide on their own. But it's absurd to say that there is no ethical dilemma in incentivizing the development of a tool that is used for evil.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#164

Post by a-nikolaev »

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…

Scott Alexander himself is a borderline crook, together with people like Peter Thiel, tainting people's perception of Silicon Valley and computer tech as a whole. So crooks do harm technology.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#165

Post by burkaman »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #123
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…

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

I don't think the concern is that the language is going to get worse, but that funding will be concentrated on the few niches that benefit crypto applications, and that people might start saying "I don't really want to work with these people, I'm gonna go do something else."

Recently a casino was built near me, and they repaved a lot of roads and added bike lanes and stuff as part of the construction. The roads are objectively better now, but I don't want to live next to a casino no matter how good the roads are, and I would have preferred if the city government had funded that work instead, since I trust them more and I have some say in how they spend their money. If you were looking for a neighborhood to move into, the first thing you noticed wouldn't be the smooth bike lanes, it would be the huge casino you can see from anywhere in a 3 mile radius.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#166

Post by archgoon »

cinntaile wrote: post #114
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…

I have re-read the blog post and I can't find what you mention. The blog post is basically telling us that cryptocurrencies and its leaders are a giant scam and they don't contribute anything of value to society. Your interpretation is very generous if you ask me. A blog post with that angle would be interesting to read though. It would have more to do with the Haskell ecosystem than this one and it would be good to…

> they don't contribute anything of value to society.

They appear to be funding Haskell development.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#168

Post by tbenst »

I have great respect for Stephen Diehl and love his writing. But I must respectfully disagree. I think it’s fantastic that Haskell is seeing more paying jobs and corporate sponsored development thanks to crypto, and indeed Haskell can help reduce fraud in cryptocurrency, like what happened with the Ethereum’s DAO.

The comparisons of crypto that he makes to frontier banks are interesting but IMHO profoundly misguided. Crypto is not a fad; it is here to stay (or at least for some currencies!). He may disagree but it’s hard to imagine bitcoin disappearing in the next decade.

I see the challenge more about what excites the current, established Haskell community (linear types! Freer monads!) vs the corporate community, who want maintainable and forward compatible code. Crypto companies could conceivably resist the traditionally fast pace of GHC development. Indeed, a lot of money rides on there being no exploitable bugs.

For all my respect of Stephen and his tremendous technical expertise, I’m disappointed to see this argument being leveled as an armchair economist condemning his peer’s work on moral grounds. I think a different, equally rational person could look at crypto and see a future in it, and I don’t think we should cast aside people for having different future expectations.

Disclosure: I am an investor in Kadena, a blockchain implemented in Haskell

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#170

Post by mnsc »

tome wrote: post #137
mnsc wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just an convenient example of an actor with power to influence that easily could be seen to have an non-mathematical ulterior motive.
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