201–210 of 341 posts
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I am not sure what you are trying to imply.
I think the implication is "old school financial institutions don't like cryptocurrencies because they will make them obsolete". so don't agree with the statement or the implication that it's relevant, but I think that's what the person above meant.
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Why the Russian government specifically? Plenty of nations do encourage this of (some of) their mathematicians and this practice is also poorly regarded by some.
Just an convenient example of an actor with power to influence that easily could be seen to have an non-mathematical ulterior motive.
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> 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?
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…
At the same time I very much think that the idea/technology of crypto currencies has potential.
I also think that language like Haskell, that prides itself in correctness and bug-free code, fits perfectly with developing that idea. I would say that is one of the large problems even more established cryptos has - they might have a bug.
I neither really see the reason why the Haskell community should be scared of having crypto people among them. What is the worst thing they could really do with the language? Fill up youtube with a lot of haskell+crypto speeches? Add crypto - related lib and code to the language? Is that really a bad thing?
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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…
Dang it, how come I didn't see this before PG's essay on conformists and individualists?
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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…
When your language is so tiny and unpopular that a growth of couple of small projects in an industry your don't like can overshadow the whole existing community... If you create neutral open source tool like a programming language, you have to be OK with people using it to do stuff that you don't approve of. And also, it's OK to have your own opinion about something and share it, but in complex matters you have to ad…
Let me take a crack at this. “ When your language is so tiny and unpopular that a growth of couple of small projects in an industry your don't like can overshadow the whole existing community” So you decide to open your argument with an insult to the community... Not a great showing. “ If you create neutral open source tool like a programming language, you have to be OK with people using it to do stuff that you don't…
Please don't expect anything too serious from me. :D
> I can’t decide to call attention to it and recommend that people don’t let the bad influence guide the direction of the whole language?
I can't see how even Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin teamed up and backed by a lot of money, could break ... let's say... C++ if they got on the design committee. Are they going to make the type system more totalitarian-state friendly? Is memory safety features better for building tools of state oppression? Are they going to introduce new features and libraries that make it more useful as a tool of industrial-level genocide?
> “ I am wrong, and who am I to make decisions for other people anyway?” > Good thing this article didn’t try to do that.
What did it try to do then?
This whole article can be TL;DR with: Some people found Haskell useful to write their software and they support Haskell development now and I don't like what that software is for, so let's do something about it.
Why?
I think there's a lot of people in Open Source community that can't separate technical and free speech (and use) aspects of their work from their moral beliefs and keep conflating the two, trying to use their beloved OS projects as a tool in yet another moral crusade of their choosing.
PS. Come to think of it, maybe Haskell compilers should change the license to some custom non-Open-Source license that says: "only programs that are technically and morally pure can be compiled". ;)
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 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…
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…
Pure nonsense.