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The Haskell Elephant in the Room

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#231

Post by gwbas1c »

chrisseaton wrote: post #14
alexmingoia wrote: post #10

”For a while it has been a public secret the Haskell ecosystem has become increasingly entangled with an unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector as one of primary mechanisms for funding development.” And those would be? I code in Haskell every day and I have no idea what he’s talking about.

This is one of those articles that attempts to talk about some situation to make it more common knowledge, but is written in such an incredibly abstract way that all you can really take away from it is 'some unknown people are upset about some unknown issue'. I feel like this 'elephant in the room' article doesn't tell me what the elephant is, why it's in the room, or why people don't want it to be in the room.

Just look at the final section, quoted:

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

> In this new era the Haskell community itself has simply become a tool to buy legitimacy and pump token values. The reputation of our community is now used to defraud the public and convince non-technical users of the soundness of an utterly unsound investment.

> I have avoided names ... however core Haskell companies such as Well-Typed, Tweag and FP Complete have been deeply complicit in building up this crypto industry for years now.

The article isn't easy to skim, and I think that's the point. The author wants to focus more on why cryptocurrency is a scam, and less on who's guilty.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#232

Post by centimeter »

xg15 wrote: post #146

I find it rather telling that almost none of the crypto advocates in this thread make any argument that cryptocurrencies are not shady. Instead, the counterarguments brought forward are essentially: - "it's not the tool's fault that it's used for shady stuff" - "so what, other people are scammers, too!" - "there are so many warnings against cryptocurrencies, it's getting boring" - "yes, crypto has scams, but maybe so…

You should have zero confidence in "the crypto community". On expectation, anyone who describes themselves in those terms is probably a scammer.

Bitcoin is not a scam, and maybe a small number of other "cryptocurrencies", but the same can not be said for any of the zillion products that try to ride on Bitcoin's coattails.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#233

Post by ivalm »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #152
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…

> C was and is widely used in weapons control systems. Let's stop using C! Let's definitely stop using C in weapons control systems.

It’s fine, after killbots kill enough people to fill up their fixed-sized arrays they segfault.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#234

Post by avindroth »

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…

I think it is too much a reductionist thinking to think it’s the users, not the tools. Math and programming languages (and media like tv or videogames) can easily stand on the sidelines, outside of the range of criticism, by making the claim that it is not the medium, but the users.

But I would argue that knowledge about something is not necessarily within that thing, but around that thing as well. A handle is a handle because we have hands that can grasp the handle. No system in this world is closed (perhaps the universe itself but still doubtful), so any knowledge pertaining to a system (or a tool) must be dependent on its context. A handle acquires meaning because of humans. Same with mathematics, programming, or otherwise.

So I would argue that yes, mathematics can be developed for nefarious purposes. Anything can be. Just because something is more pure and seemingly neutral than others does not mean that thing will stay independent of its context. The outlier example is the statistical farcity and bias in scientific experiments. Take it a step further in the direction of objectivity, and you could also notice that bias plays a role in mathematical experiments.

Another interesting question might be: is uranium evil? Or are videogames evil? Are these seemingly neutral things, containers of things, evil? Or are common manifestations of them, or the way that the medium encourages its content (and the way that Haskell and its ecosystem encourage their application) relevant to the judgment of that particular “container”?

I believe a lot of this has to do with seemingly emotion-less quality of abstractions (i.e. containers). In the abstractions-land, the mathematics land, the “pure” land, only the relevant essence of the thing at hand is extracted, thus the compression seemingly occurs losslessly. However, in the compression from the real to the abstract, we have also lost the sensual, the tactile, the emotional. We go from a soul to a 4.5 million deaths. We go from the wet texture of water to H2O. By compressing, we gain, but also we lose.

A bit sidetracked, but I think any medium can appreciate being examined in such a way.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#235

Post by tome »

centimeter wrote: post #230

Lazy and poorly-considered article. It conflates Bitcoiners with shitcoin grifters like Cardano. It's also beyond stupid to purity-police the uses of a programming language. There's no collective tradeoff we have to make here. It doesn't cost me anything as a Haskell dev if someone is using it in some scam somewhere.

That's interesting. What's wrong with Cardano?

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#236

Post by tome »

mcguire wrote: post #179
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…

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…

> If you want to use Haskell today, the jobs are essentially all cryptocurrency

This is not true, by the way.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#237

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

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…

That is not the core argument though? Nobody uses C in order to make their nukes more marketable.

Crypto uses the academic big-brain alpha-nerd reputation of Haskell to make their platform appear more reputable. „Look, written by 100% organic PHD-certified FP programmers, raised on our free-range Monad Farm. Oh btw our whitepapers are Very Legit and definitely not just decorum for an ICO scam.“

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#238

Post by benedikt »

shpongled wrote: post #194
mcguire wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actua…

I'm certainly not going to argue against your points here, since I agree with them, by and large. I personally am not a fan of FB or Palantir, and I suspect I dislike the surveillance state more than the average HN reader. My comment was more on his word choice (which I find to be a bit hyperbolic)

twitter isnt the place for reasonable nuanced discussion, if you think facebook et al. are bad then you are supposed to agree with the hyperbolic black and white language.

although this isnt twitter, i sometimes feel like the commenters on HN have spent too much time on twitter. i cant stand opinionated twitter "personalities" that tweet more than they code, and it's been bleeding over to other places as well.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#239

Post by tome »

fwip wrote: post #163
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 langu…

Those things don't sound like tools to me. Better examples would be hammers, screwdrivers, etc..

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#240

Post by exdsq »

asddubs wrote: post #193
archgoon wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they don't contribute anything of value to society. They appear to be funding Haskell development.

is that worth however many percent of the worlds energy usage?

There’s no PoW Haskell chains I’m aware of, they’re POS chains which are far more energy efficient- therefore they reduce energy usage as people move over to them.
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