Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Haskell Elephant in the Room

stephendiehl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 341 posts

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#311

Post by tamrix »

c3534l wrote: post #246

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 la…

If you dive into the crypto world. There's a ton of cons that promise the world just to bump up the cost.

A quick way to make a buck was to look at the dates for crypto roadmap announcement, launch or white paper. Buy crypto a week before, then sell a day before the announcement before everyone else buys in.

This become so popular many coins where created just for this purpose. They would claim the world as the next bitcoin. Then after the announcement, seized to exist.

That brings us to this post. They're using Haskell as the 'new tech' to pump and dump coins.

There's so many scam coins out there. It really shows you how stupid the whole thing is.

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#312

Post by arianvanp »

drcode wrote: post #32
bondarchuk wrote: post #11

Very much a generic anti-cryptocurrency rant, and very little haskell-specific clarifications. I understand not wanting to name specific projects (Cardano comes to mind; " Cardano is a blockchain platform built on the groundbreaking Ouroboros proof-of-stake consensus protocol, and developed using the Haskell programming language: a functional programming language that enables Cardano to pursue evidence-based developm…

It doesn't work to talk about an "elephant in the room" and then not name names. The whole point of the idiom is that you're criticizing other people for not concretely naming things.

He explicitly calls out the elephants in the last paragraph

Namely Well-typed, FPComplete and Tweag.io who are all consultancy companies working on the Cardano project

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#313

Post by dgellow »

renodubois wrote: post #303
dgellow wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... who actually thinks this way when they select technologies? If Go was used for a lot of crypto scam, I wouldn’t spend a second thinking about it when I’m deciding to use it for my non-scam, non-crypto’s project. I have difficulty to understand how it is an issue that a programming language is used for a niche that has bad reputation.

From my view, its less about using the technology for side projects, and more about job prospects using that language. If Haskell jobs are overwhelmingly associated with crypto, and that’s a negative association for most people, they might be less likely to invest time into learning Haskell, as they’re not interested in joining the crypto industry.

That’s fair, thanks for sharing your point of view

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#315

Post by shawnz »

tsimionescu wrote: post #265
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> worried about users associating your favorite language with the seedy world of cash transactions when did we start calling cash transactions seedy? you own a pub, somebody pays in cash is automatically seedy? let's maybe look into offshore banking and US offshore jurisdictions such as New Mexico, Delaware and Nevada first (tax havens in our midst) before bringing out the guns on the little people who have a bad lin…

GP was obviously joking, trying to show that crypto-currencies are no different than cash, so anyone who calls crypto-currencies 'seedy' would also have to consider cash 'seedy'. However, crypto-currencies are in reality not like cash, because fat more than being an anonymous medium of exchange, they are in fact mostly an unregulated speculative investment, and unregulated speculative investments are, in fact, quite…

Because there are a lot of speculators, that makes it seedy? What does the amount of speculators have to do with the seediness of the underlying technology? I thought it was "seedy" because it can be used for fraud?

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#316

Post by mantap »

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…

You can replace cryptocurrency with cash there and it's just as true. In fact, cash is much more anonymous than cryptocurrency as there is no paper trail. The value that cryptocurrency provides to criminals is the same value it provides to everybody else: easy transfers across borders, and storing money outside of the control of governments. You might trust your government but what percentage of the world's population should trust their government?

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#317

Post by st1ck »

teruakohatu wrote: post #295
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…

What iare the killer haskell fintech libraries?

They are likely all in-house tools. Take a look at github projects of this Haskell-using bank for example: https://github.com/barclays

Not sure if this counts, but IIRC in one of the talks, Edward Kmett was describing row-polymorphic language they implemented in Scala to be used internally at S&P (or wherever he was working).

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#318

Post by st1ck »

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.…

Maybe I'm a bit silly about this, but can't linear or affine types be actually useful for blockchain? To represent something which can be used (spent) only once?

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#319

Post by st1ck »

bondarchuk wrote: post #11

Very much a generic anti-cryptocurrency rant, and very little haskell-specific clarifications. I understand not wanting to name specific projects (Cardano comes to mind; " Cardano is a blockchain platform built on the groundbreaking Ouroboros proof-of-stake consensus protocol, and developed using the Haskell programming language: a functional programming language that enables Cardano to pursue evidence-based developm…

While Cardano is the biggest of the elephants, there are others, like e.g. Dolla, slightly related to Well-Typed through e.g. https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-feuer-04111a73

Re: The Haskell Elephant in the Room

#320

Post by st1ck »

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…

That's very relevant context. I had an impression that he considers Cardano worse than Facebook, while IMO it's mostly harmless project compared to major software employers.
Post reply on HN