The Haskell Elephant in the Room • Hacker News Board

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#241

Post by msla » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

avindroth wrote: post #234

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…

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 hand…

> Or are videogames evil?

I'll answer that when you give me a definition of the term.

Might want to start with defining "game" and then pare it down.

My point is, you can't say something is evil until you have a coherent definition of what that thing is.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#242

Post by c3534l » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

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…

I find it ironic that he should criticize Plantir and Facebook for creating a surveillance state, yet also crypto for allowing anonymous monetary transactions.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#243

Post by msla » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

anaphor wrote: post #31

There are also a lot of traditional finance companies using Haskell[1]. And, historically some of the people who created the language itself and have worked on GHC (and other compilers), or contributed heavily to the ecosystem have worked for traditional banks[2]. I don't mention them to encourage people to attack these people, but it comes off as a bit selective to focus on the people using your language for cryptoc…

The only solution to what the article is ranting about is to grow the ecosystem. Move it beyond all kinds of banking. Move it beyond all kinds of finance. Move it beyond all kinds of any specific industry or endeavor. Otherwise, we'll continue to have people ranting about cars because people drive to and from some kinds of jobs the article writers think are bad.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#244

Post by josemaenzo » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

nocoiner

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#245

Post by msla » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #71

Barrin92 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economics is a science. You get an idea what's 'pseudo' or not by working in or familiarizing yourself with the field. Say, The New neoclassical synthesis is very much as standard as it gets, whereas Marxist or Austrian economics exist on the fringes. In general something is pseudo-scientific if it operates outside of the formalisms or tools of that particular discipline, especially if it pretends that it does not.

Economics is not something that can be tested easily on a large scale, so most of it becomes about trying to explain why things happened in retrospect.

You can say exactly the same thing about archaeology or geology or cosmology...

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#246

Post by c3534l » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

Cryptocurrency enables people to make anonymous monetary transactions. Also, so does cash. Drug dealers and criminals still very much prefer cash. Is it wrong to work with certain traditional finance companies because of their association with cash? Should we be worried about users associating your favorite language with the seedy world of cash transactions which subvert the traditional role and spying capacity of large financial institutions? This is the first I've ever heard anyone suggest that Haskell is associated with criminality in any way. Its associated with academics, and nerds, and maybe even hobby programmers. But if I bring up Haskell among a group of people, criminal enterprises is not going to be in the 100 top-associated things with that language. There is no elephant, the connection is strenuous, and if such an elephant existed, it would not be worthy of serious consideration.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#247

Post by msla » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #190

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.

I'm surprised you associate with such problematic people.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#248

Post by eigenspace » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #217

mcguire wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A large part of Julia, a pragmatic language for technical computing, is written in Scheme.

No, not really. The parser is written in FemtoLisp (a Scheme dialect), but that's it. It's not actually doing anything other than the parsing, and there's actually work being done to replace that with a pure julia parser.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#249

Post by 127 » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

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…

It's impossible to build a money system that isn't at some level shady, outside making it completely totalitarian. Just based on simple definitions and some logic.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#250

Post by owl57 » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

ordinaryradical wrote: post #188

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 curren…

> Money laundering

You mean the trade-off between global surveillance and easier life for some sorts of businesses. Is it immediately obvious which of these is more worth supporting?

> and child pornography

Oh yeah, think of the children. Never gets old.