The Haskell Elephant in the Room

Post by ansible » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

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…

Post by a_humean » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

Post by leotaku » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

Post by agentultra » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

chriswarbo wrote: post #145

bodhiandpysics1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true... all turing complete type systems are unsound (where the type metalanguage itself is a turing complete language), but you can have a sound type system of a turing complete language, and in fact haskel itself has such a type system.

Haskell's type system is unsound. Here's an example, where we can prove that 1 + 1 = 1: {-# LANGUAGE GADTs, TypeFamilies #-} -- Peano arithmetic: these types represent '0' and '1+n' data Zero data Succ n -- We can define 1 as '1+0', 2 as '1+1', and so on type One = Succ Zero type Two = Succ One -- A closed type family is a function at the type level. -- This function implements addition of the above Peano numbers. ty…

Post by mcguire » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 6:43 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…