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The Haskell Elephant in the Room

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#181

Post by nine_k »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #118
nine_k wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

S-100 was open.

Yes, and extermely widely used, despite its bitter flaws.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#182

Post by p0llard »

exdsq wrote: post #160

Weird, seeing this is Stephen Diehls company summary: "Automate financial controls and processes in your corporate treasury with inter-company loans, virtual account management, powerful APIs and a distributed ledger made for financial audibility & compliance." https://www.adjoint.io/

What are you getting at?

There's a pretty big difference between corporate treasury software and cryptocurrency scams? Unless you're trying to argue that anything related to finance is a scam?

I don't see what point you're trying to make, it seems such an irrelevant comment that it makes me question your motive and wonder if you're trying to smear Stephen.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#183

Post by mcguire »

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…

"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."

Does PHP have a significant taint to the rest of the development community? Yes. Are its "nicely designed tools" recognized and used outside the PHP community? Not that I've seen.

Wikipedia is a web site I use and sometimes poke at. Am I going to go looking at its code? Nope. In fact, there are several tools that I decided not to fix bugs in, but also not to use myself, when I realized they were PHP.

(Aside: have they ever removed, or even deprecated, any of the layers of hideously broken interfaces in the stdlib? Or are they still lying there as a trap for the unwary?)

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#184

Post by tlholaday »

> The value of these assets is only determined by what other people are willing to pay for them.

According to William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger, the value of every asset is only determined by what other people are willing to pay for it. It seems a good match for cryptocurrencies.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#185

Post by fwip »

ahmedtd wrote: post #180
nine_k wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One of the few takeaways I remember from my engineering ethics class is one way to think about the ethical implications of a tool: if you have a situation, and you introduce a tool, how do the possible outcomes of the situation change? For example, if you have two people arguing without weapons, the likely outcomes of the situation aren't strongly weighted towards one or both of the participants being maimed or kille…

I like that lens of analysis, thank you for sharing.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#186

Post by mcguire »

shpongled wrote: post #158
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 consider Stephen to be an extremist when it comes to stuff like this. I follow him on twitter, and he frequently tweets things like: "More programmers should have the moral fortitude to stand up to the Facebook employees in their communities. This is not a socially acceptable career. Facebook employees have chosen to turn their skills on poisoning the very communities that gave them opportunities to thrive." [0] "P…

Well, to be honest, the negative beliefs about Facebook and Palantir are pretty common; I suspect rather a lot of people here would agree that Facebook is "poisoning the very communities that gave them opportunities to thrive" and Palantir is creating "a nightmare surveillance state".

If that is the case, it seems like Stephen would be just a little less hypocritical than most, trying to convince programmers to actually follow through.

A short while back, I mentioned here that Henry Petroski said that the origin of engineering ethics is that engineers shouldn't compete solely on price. That hasn't been the case for a long time, not since some bridge fell down and killed a bunch of people. Now, engineering ethics involves saying "no" when you boss wants you to do something you feel is unethical, illegal, or just plain stupid. Nobody wants to do that. It hurts. But some people think it's a part of professional behavior.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#187

Post by kabdib »

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.

> It also invented PC.

No. Personal computers were around for quite a while before IBM decided to enter the market (with a not very good and very expensive machine, I should add).

The PC mantle probably goes to Processor Technology, or maybe someone a little earlier. I'm counting 8-bit chipsets, the date gets pushed back a LOT farther if you're talking PDP-8s or earlier systems (much less commonly available to the public). Or you could take it forward to 1977/78 and give the title to Apple.

But it's definitely not IBM.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#188

Post by ordinaryradical »

tbenst wrote: post #168

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.…

> 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

By comparing cryptocurrencies to wildcat banks, he was not making a statement about cryptocurrency's longevity but about its utility.

Money laundering and child pornography are not fads, and for those two reasons alone there will probably always be value in non-fiat currencies that preserve the user's anonymity. That does not make cryptocurrency something any community or individual should want a long-term association with.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#189

Post by mcguire »

nine_k wrote: post #101
ajuc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reasona…

SS-Sturmbannführer. About the same as a Major. Yes, in the SS.

I may be the only one who giggles when driving past the Werner von Braun Center on Redstone Arsenal. It a very attractive, very new part of Army Missile Command.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#190

Post by mcguire »

tbenst wrote: post #168

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.…

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

Dianne has been threatening to get me a "I'm sorry the sound of my eyes rolling bothered you" T-shirt.

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