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The Haskell Elephant in the Room

stephendiehl.com

211–220 of 341 posts

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#211
post #85

I don't really care for how naïve this description of "how economy works" is or isn't, but being upset that instead of Haskell being used virtually nowhere, it is finally used somewhere is pretty hilarious.

Haskell's unofficial motto is "avoid 'success at all costs'", which is referenced near the end of the article. Piggybacking on crypto fraud would be a cost that's worth avoiding.

Very well-put, thank you.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#212
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…

Where in the article did the author give any advice on using or not using Haskell? The article was criticizing the Haskell community, of which the author is a member, not Haskell as a tool.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#213
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…

`Computers themselves were initially designed for artillery fire control, with an explicit intention of killing people.` any citation for this?

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#214
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.

I was a purescript developer and Haskell dabbler way before I was an investor, for what it’s worth, and happy to engage on the substance of my points if you would care to have a collegial discourse befitting of academics!

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is bitcoin if not a distributed ledger?

Using cryptographic primitives to implement a non-productive asset is one thing; using cryptographic primitives as some kind of ledger goes back to the 70s, heck even Git uses Merkle trees.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they are trying to imply that, because some crypto projects are targeting similar markets, there might be some conflict of interest that motivated Diehl to create his post. To me this reads less like a smear and more just "this could be why he dislikes crypto that much".

They aren't really targeting similar markets (at least from my perspective): pretty much any multinational firm can benefit from better corporate treasury management; cryptocurrencies are just one application of this technology, and Stephen is calling out specifically those which are attempting to defraud (or at least benefit from the the gross ignorance of) retail investors.

Those seem like entirely different markets to me.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#217
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…

If you want to use Fortran today, the jobs are essentially all government contracting. If you want to use Haskell today, the jobs are essentially all cryptocurrency. If you don't want to get into government contracting (which is hard to get out of), or if you don't want to do cryptocurrency, you don't get to use Fortran or Haskell. What happens if the bottom falls out of the cryptocurrency job market? Does Haskell be…

Fortran is used all over for high performance computing, not just in government contracting. Scheme is not only used for language research. A large part of Julia, a pragmatic language for technical computing, is written in Scheme.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#218
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…

`Computers themselves were initially designed for artillery fire control, with an explicit intention of killing people.` any citation for this?

"The first fully functioning electronic digital computer to be built in the U.S. was ENIAC, constructed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, for the Army Ordnance Department, by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. Completed in 1945, ENIAC was somewhat similar to the earlier Colossus, but considerably larger and more flexible (although far from general-purpose). The primary function for which ENIAC was designed was the calculation of tables used in aiming artillery. ENIAC was not a stored-program computer, and setting it up for a new job involved reconfiguring the machine by means of plugs and switches. For many years, ENIAC was believed to have been the first functioning electronic digital computer, Colossus being unknown to all but a few."[1]

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computing-history/

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#219
post #108

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…

> My point is exactly that: a technology itself can't be tainted by crooks using it.

Reportedly Lisp was hit pretty hard by its association with AI hype collapse ("The AI Winter"). Of course this doesn't change the merits of a language per se, but it can be a blow to the community and investments around it.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a certain class of computer programs that can best be described as a really big table. Basically, an input taken from a finite set, you get an output taken from a finite set. This type of program is really easy to write in Haskel because you can prove that both the conplete input set and output set are covered using the type system. In other words you can prove that you deal with every possible case (though…

That's basically a DAG - directed acyclical graph. Data is transformed from inputs to outputs with no state or branching on the macro level of the transform. Lots of programs have parts that map to this very well. The cracks show when someone realizes this and thinks it is a silver bullet to build an architecture that ONLY does this. Then the parts that inevitably do need branching, state, and complex loops become a…

Hm, what's the issue with state and branching?
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