6 ms·

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

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 how the tool might be used, or who has been involved in the past.

nine_k 6y ago
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 problem may be the attitude, not the industry affiliation.
- mnsc 6y ago
  Interesting that you brought up mathematics. My shallow view of the haskell community is that they think haskell is/should be as theoretically solid as mathematics. And based on this, my interpretation of the underlying fear in the article is analogous to the Russian government somehow duping all the world's mathematicians to only work on the problem domain of breaking cryptos (and incidentally primarily the type of cryptos used by "enemy" nations) and all the mathematicians dropping everything and going "yeah, that sound super cool let's do that, maybe someone else will pick up my work in combinatorial topography"
  - tome 6y ago
    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.
    - mnsc 6y ago
      Just an convenient example of an actor with power to influence that easily could be seen to have an non-mathematical ulterior motive.
      - sam_lowry_ 6y ago
        US fares better on this point, AFAICS.
- burkaman 6y ago
  The analogy I would make is that there are many mathematicians and computer scientists who are unwilling to work for the CIA, but would be thrilled if a university gave them a lot of funding to research the exact same stuff. The math itself is not nefarious, but the community is. If Haskell became known as "the crypto people's language", many talented computer scientists and engineers would be unwilling to join the community or invest anything in the language. Partly out of a sense of "I don't want to directly help them", and partly just "I don't know those people and I don't really want to go to their conferences, and all my friends in academia are working on <new language x>, what's that all about". For someone like Stephen Diehl who is deeply embedded in the Haskell community and has invested a lot in it, that would be a personal and professional loss. You're right that the language itself and its technical features would not be nefarious, and would be replicated in 100 other languages.
- mcguire 6y ago
  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 become Scheme, a language used only for language research?
  - leephillips 6y ago
    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.
    - eigenspace 6y ago
      > 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.
      - leephillips 6y ago
        In the first paper¹ describing the language design, by its creators, they state that: “Our implementation of Julia consists of 11000 lines of C, 4000 lines of C++, and 3500 lines of Scheme”. [1] https://julialang.org/blog/2012/08/design-and-implementation-of-julia/ https://julialang.org/blog/2012/08/design-and-implementation...
        eigenspace 6y ago
        That's from 2012 when the language was in version 0.1. We're now in version 1.4 (1.5 launching soon!). At this point, 3.1% of the julia git repo is femptlisp (scheme), but I can assure you that is not being used for any heavy lifting or scientific computations. It's for the parser.
- pizza 6y ago
  I assume by tooling the GP doesn't mean something like a monadic http library but something more like an app, like an offshore account balance checker
- avindroth 6y ago
  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.
  - msla 6y ago
    > 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.
    - 6y ago
cinntaile 6y ago
I have re-read the blog post and I can't find what you mention. The blog post is basically telling us that cryptocurrencies and its leaders are a giant scam and they don't contribute anything of value to society. Your interpretation is very generous if you ask me. A blog post with that angle would be interesting to read though. It would have more to do with the Haskell ecosystem than this one and it would be good to have that discussion if the cryptocurrency influence on the ecosystem is too big.
- burkaman 6y ago
  Well yes, if the author didn't think cryptocurrencies were a problem, then he probably wouldn't be bothered by crypto currencies influencing the community. There are always going to be large organizations influencing Haskell, like the UK government and Microsoft in the past. I'm guessing this blog post is aimed at people who work with Haskell and know about the crypto companies in the community, but see them like any other organization that funds open source development. I agree it would be great to have more details about how big this influence is and how it manifests itself.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    It's not about "influence". It's about feeling bad that the Haskell libraries are being paid for by the victims of financial scams.
    - regisg 6y ago
      Cardano was funded with an ICO in Japan, one of the most restrictive country about crypto-currencies. The amount was 64M$ which is not that much for developing a blockchain for 5 years with almost 100 researchers & devs. It's not a scam.
- archgoon 6y ago
  > they don't contribute anything of value to society. They appear to be funding Haskell development.
SkyMarshal 6y ago
Does anyone have any notion of what language decisions might be affected, especially for the worse, by factoring cryptocurrency considerations into it?
- burkaman 6y ago
  I don't think the concern is that the language is going to get worse, but that funding will be concentrated on the few niches that benefit crypto applications, and that people might start saying "I don't really want to work with these people, I'm gonna go do something else." Recently a casino was built near me, and they repaved a lot of roads and added bike lanes and stuff as part of the construction. The roads are objectively better now, but I don't want to live next to a casino no matter how good the roads are, and I would have preferred if the city government had funded that work instead, since I trust them more and I have some say in how they spend their money. If you were looking for a neighborhood to move into, the first thing you noticed wouldn't be the smooth bike lanes, it would be the huge casino you can see from anywhere in a 3 mile radius.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dtseng123 6y ago
You are correct.

nine_k 6y ago

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 problem may be the attitude, not the industry affiliation.

mnsc 6y ago
Interesting that you brought up mathematics. My shallow view of the haskell community is that they think haskell is/should be as theoretically solid as mathematics. And based on this, my interpretation of the underlying fear in the article is analogous to the Russian government somehow duping all the world's mathematicians to only work on the problem domain of breaking cryptos (and incidentally primarily the type of cryptos used by "enemy" nations) and all the mathematicians dropping everything and going "yeah, that sound super cool let's do that, maybe someone else will pick up my work in combinatorial topography"
- tome 6y ago
  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.
  - mnsc 6y ago
    Just an convenient example of an actor with power to influence that easily could be seen to have an non-mathematical ulterior motive.
    - sam_lowry_ 6y ago
      US fares better on this point, AFAICS.
burkaman 6y ago
The analogy I would make is that there are many mathematicians and computer scientists who are unwilling to work for the CIA, but would be thrilled if a university gave them a lot of funding to research the exact same stuff. The math itself is not nefarious, but the community is. If Haskell became known as "the crypto people's language", many talented computer scientists and engineers would be unwilling to join the community or invest anything in the language. Partly out of a sense of "I don't want to directly help them", and partly just "I don't know those people and I don't really want to go to their conferences, and all my friends in academia are working on <new language x>, what's that all about". For someone like Stephen Diehl who is deeply embedded in the Haskell community and has invested a lot in it, that would be a personal and professional loss. You're right that the language itself and its technical features would not be nefarious, and would be replicated in 100 other languages.
mcguire 6y ago
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 become Scheme, a language used only for language research?
- leephillips 6y ago
  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.
  - eigenspace 6y ago
    > 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.
    - leephillips 6y ago
      In the first paper¹ describing the language design, by its creators, they state that: “Our implementation of Julia consists of 11000 lines of C, 4000 lines of C++, and 3500 lines of Scheme”. [1] https://julialang.org/blog/2012/08/design-and-implementation-of-julia/ https://julialang.org/blog/2012/08/design-and-implementation...
      - eigenspace 6y ago
        That's from 2012 when the language was in version 0.1. We're now in version 1.4 (1.5 launching soon!). At this point, 3.1% of the julia git repo is femptlisp (scheme), but I can assure you that is not being used for any heavy lifting or scientific computations. It's for the parser.
pizza 6y ago
I assume by tooling the GP doesn't mean something like a monadic http library but something more like an app, like an offshore account balance checker
avindroth 6y ago
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.
- msla 6y ago
  > 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.
  - 6y ago

cinntaile 6y ago

I have re-read the blog post and I can't find what you mention. The blog post is basically telling us that cryptocurrencies and its leaders are a giant scam and they don't contribute anything of value to society. Your interpretation is very generous if you ask me. A blog post with that angle would be interesting to read though. It would have more to do with the Haskell ecosystem than this one and it would be good to have that discussion if the cryptocurrency influence on the ecosystem is too big.

burkaman 6y ago
Well yes, if the author didn't think cryptocurrencies were a problem, then he probably wouldn't be bothered by crypto currencies influencing the community. There are always going to be large organizations influencing Haskell, like the UK government and Microsoft in the past. I'm guessing this blog post is aimed at people who work with Haskell and know about the crypto companies in the community, but see them like any other organization that funds open source development. I agree it would be great to have more details about how big this influence is and how it manifests itself.
- sukilot 6y ago
  It's not about "influence". It's about feeling bad that the Haskell libraries are being paid for by the victims of financial scams.
  - regisg 6y ago
    Cardano was funded with an ICO in Japan, one of the most restrictive country about crypto-currencies. The amount was 64M$ which is not that much for developing a blockchain for 5 years with almost 100 researchers & devs. It's not a scam.
archgoon 6y ago
> they don't contribute anything of value to society. They appear to be funding Haskell development.

SkyMarshal 6y ago

Does anyone have any notion of what language decisions might be affected, especially for the worse, by factoring cryptocurrency considerations into it?

burkaman 6y ago
I don't think the concern is that the language is going to get worse, but that funding will be concentrated on the few niches that benefit crypto applications, and that people might start saying "I don't really want to work with these people, I'm gonna go do something else." Recently a casino was built near me, and they repaved a lot of roads and added bike lanes and stuff as part of the construction. The roads are objectively better now, but I don't want to live next to a casino no matter how good the roads are, and I would have preferred if the city government had funded that work instead, since I trust them more and I have some say in how they spend their money. If you were looking for a neighborhood to move into, the first thing you noticed wouldn't be the smooth bike lanes, it would be the huge casino you can see from anywhere in a 3 mile radius.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dtseng123 6y ago

You are correct.