4 ms·

What percentage of Haskell jobs are crypto jobs? I bet it’s high

by hsavit1 3y ago

mighmi 3y ago
How'd it get high adoption in that field?
- hudon 3y ago
  Sorry to be blunt, but it's probably because of how crypto is a Rube Goldberg machine that attracts similar tinkerers as those attracted by Haskell's Rube Goldberg machine aspects. Both technologies seem to be doing a lot of complicated stuff, and so they attract a kind of technologist that enjoys technology for technology's sake.
  - Buttons840 3y ago
    Maybe. I thought it had more to do with smart contracts, where the the mathematical and research oriented nature of Haskell helps somehow? I figured it had something to do with the "if it compiles, it works" aspect of Haskell (granted, Haskell has bugs like any language, but it's closer to the compiles = perfect standard.) I know the one and only Haskell job I personally looked into was about smart contracts.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    And using the latest webframework garbage react iteration is not tech for tech sake? Or worse tech for resume sake. At least with the former I get to enjoy myself.
    - intelVISA 3y ago
      Plus, at least using Haskell exercises the mind: most web frameworks seem designed to keep one's thoughts sedentary.
  - peterbecich 3y ago
    I like Scala and Haskell. The selling points of high assurances by their compilers appealed to me. Opinion: Something I did not anticipate is these languages allow a high degree of individual choice in coding style by a programmer, and companies tend to dislike this. I have read this sentiment about Clojure shops; the original authors are very capable in the codebase but it can be hard to bring in new team members later. It seems to me most companies prefer less expressive languages with opinionated style guidelines. I have never worked with Python professionally, but apparently there is a high emphasis on style consistency in the community. Obviously there exist projects in less expressive languages that are hard to maintain, so maybe ease-of-onboarding and ease-of-maintenance depend on something else. I still believe the type system of Haskell can provide great benefits to codebase maintenance over the long term. If the coding style were restricted and opinionated, it might assist with company adoption.
    - Tanjreeve 3y ago
      If your products biggest concern is fungibility of developers and controlling what developers can do then you likely wouldn't be getting any value from any of the group of expressive languages anyway. >Obviously there exist projects in less expressive languages that are hard to maintain This is the flip side of more conservative language choices. The moment you're off the beaten path you're doing way more custom stuff to work around the language. My favourite one I point at is Instagram's use of Python is commonly held up as "Python can do everything" but when you read their tech blogs you're basically reading "here's how we got some extremely skilled specialist language Devs to Jerry rig custom functionality onto python to create a flavour that could be doing absolutely anything. All to avoid hiring a few devs with a copy of a standard manual for some other language. > I still believe the type system of Haskell can provide great benefits to codebase maintenance over the long term. If the coding style were restricted and opinionated, it might assist with company adoption. Counterpoint. What if it's an impossible task for languages to encode a business domain and they should give your developers the tools to do it and then get out of the way? Its still opinionated. Its just that the opinions are coming from your businesses stack.
      - peterbecich 3y ago
  - grumpyprole 3y ago
    Haskell is a well designed language. Designed by some of worlds best experts on programming language theory. I don't think it has any "Rube Goldberg machine aspects", Solidity on the other hand...
    - peterbecich 3y ago
      I agree completely. Haskell is a more difficult language to learn in my opinion than Python or Java, but there are real benefits in the runtime errors it can prevent.
      - grumpyprole 3y ago
        Not sure why you are getting downvoted, but I agree. There is a learning curve to Haskell, which should not be surprising. Haskell is to Python what Python is to ARM assembly. ARM assembly has less of a learning curve than Python. There's simply much less to learn and it's much more flexible. But of course it's not at all productive and even harder to build correct software with. Once the learning curve has been overcome, most would agree that higher-level languages are more productive. I am significantly more productive in Haskell than Python, especially for any highly non-trivial problem.
  - amelius 3y ago
    > Haskell's Rube Goldberg machine aspects Eh, it's the other way around. As you keep adding functionality to a program in an imperative language, at some point it will turn into a mess that you can describe as a Rube Goldberg machine. Functional programming allows one to keep one's head cool, and thus you will reach tipping point complexity at a much later stage. FP allows one to build taller buildings. This is what attracts smart people to Haskell.
    - tome 3y ago
      Agreed, I was surprised too. Haskell is the only language I've used in which the codebase doesn't turn into a Rube Goldberg machine in the short amount of time (granted most of that was Python -- maybe it's Python in particular that has a problem).
  - xcv123 3y ago
    The Rube Goldberg machine builders will do the same in any language. Give them Java and they will build monstrosities beyond your comprehension. The functional paradigm has its strengths and weaknesses, just like any other paradigm. One of its strengths is facilitating elegant, easily understood, and highly correct code -- but that depends on the developer.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  Smart contracts are foot guns and so they are an interesting case for formal verification and advanced static typing people. They usually like Haskell. I like formal verification but not blockchain, however , the jobs are there. Saving actual lives with formal methods is not worth the money, so we prove Ponzi schemes to be correct. A little over the top, sorry, but it is hurting just a tad that chemo delivery devices have less rigid software than something that is marketed as an everyone wins lottery type of thing.
  - peterbecich 3y ago
    Yes, to add to this, it was an opportune time at the beginning of a new sector with no legacy code. I've read that iOS Apps benefited in a similar way in security over Mac OS; there was an opportunity to start fresh without backward compatibility requirements.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if a huge factor is just marketing. Most crypto products are only built to be sold to some investor. And saying it's all built on Haskell probably sells better than saying it's a bog standard typescript program.
- ActorNightly 3y ago
  Insert something about "our coin is secure because we code in a language that prevents programmers from making mistakes".
- agumonkey 3y ago
  would you rather handling money in php or haskell ?
  - icrbow 3y ago
    I've seen a company doing that in Visual Basic. It was successful enough to have a nice office etc.
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    I would rather handle money in what I know best.
nh2 3y ago
This is easy to answer, at least for this data set: It contains all job descriptions (see link to Google Sheet, scroll to bottom). From a 30 seconds look, it seems there are around 5 cryptocurrency jobs in the list for year 2022. You will find that currently the list of Haskell companies is quite diverse across industries, which is a big change vs. 10 years ago.
amelius 3y ago
How many are in embedded systems?
- shae 3y ago
  More than you'd expect, if you like FPGA development. Clash for FPGA work, and several tools from Galois for embedded real time uses.
  - amelius 3y ago
    Ok, so it's in the tooling, not in the actual binaries running on embedded systems.
    - shae 3y ago
      Right, same as C but unlike FORTH

What percentage of Haskell jobs are crypto jobs? I bet it’s high

mighmi 3y ago

How'd it get high adoption in that field?

hudon 3y ago
Sorry to be blunt, but it's probably because of how crypto is a Rube Goldberg machine that attracts similar tinkerers as those attracted by Haskell's Rube Goldberg machine aspects. Both technologies seem to be doing a lot of complicated stuff, and so they attract a kind of technologist that enjoys technology for technology's sake.
- Buttons840 3y ago
  Maybe. I thought it had more to do with smart contracts, where the the mathematical and research oriented nature of Haskell helps somehow? I figured it had something to do with the "if it compiles, it works" aspect of Haskell (granted, Haskell has bugs like any language, but it's closer to the compiles = perfect standard.) I know the one and only Haskell job I personally looked into was about smart contracts.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  And using the latest webframework garbage react iteration is not tech for tech sake? Or worse tech for resume sake. At least with the former I get to enjoy myself.
  - intelVISA 3y ago
    Plus, at least using Haskell exercises the mind: most web frameworks seem designed to keep one's thoughts sedentary.
- peterbecich 3y ago
  I like Scala and Haskell. The selling points of high assurances by their compilers appealed to me. Opinion: Something I did not anticipate is these languages allow a high degree of individual choice in coding style by a programmer, and companies tend to dislike this. I have read this sentiment about Clojure shops; the original authors are very capable in the codebase but it can be hard to bring in new team members later. It seems to me most companies prefer less expressive languages with opinionated style guidelines. I have never worked with Python professionally, but apparently there is a high emphasis on style consistency in the community. Obviously there exist projects in less expressive languages that are hard to maintain, so maybe ease-of-onboarding and ease-of-maintenance depend on something else. I still believe the type system of Haskell can provide great benefits to codebase maintenance over the long term. If the coding style were restricted and opinionated, it might assist with company adoption.
  - Tanjreeve 3y ago
    If your products biggest concern is fungibility of developers and controlling what developers can do then you likely wouldn't be getting any value from any of the group of expressive languages anyway. >Obviously there exist projects in less expressive languages that are hard to maintain This is the flip side of more conservative language choices. The moment you're off the beaten path you're doing way more custom stuff to work around the language. My favourite one I point at is Instagram's use of Python is commonly held up as "Python can do everything" but when you read their tech blogs you're basically reading "here's how we got some extremely skilled specialist language Devs to Jerry rig custom functionality onto python to create a flavour that could be doing absolutely anything. All to avoid hiring a few devs with a copy of a standard manual for some other language. > I still believe the type system of Haskell can provide great benefits to codebase maintenance over the long term. If the coding style were restricted and opinionated, it might assist with company adoption. Counterpoint. What if it's an impossible task for languages to encode a business domain and they should give your developers the tools to do it and then get out of the way? Its still opinionated. Its just that the opinions are coming from your businesses stack.
    - peterbecich 3y ago
- grumpyprole 3y ago
  Haskell is a well designed language. Designed by some of worlds best experts on programming language theory. I don't think it has any "Rube Goldberg machine aspects", Solidity on the other hand...
  - peterbecich 3y ago
    I agree completely. Haskell is a more difficult language to learn in my opinion than Python or Java, but there are real benefits in the runtime errors it can prevent.
    - grumpyprole 3y ago
      Not sure why you are getting downvoted, but I agree. There is a learning curve to Haskell, which should not be surprising. Haskell is to Python what Python is to ARM assembly. ARM assembly has less of a learning curve than Python. There's simply much less to learn and it's much more flexible. But of course it's not at all productive and even harder to build correct software with. Once the learning curve has been overcome, most would agree that higher-level languages are more productive. I am significantly more productive in Haskell than Python, especially for any highly non-trivial problem.
- amelius 3y ago
  > Haskell's Rube Goldberg machine aspects Eh, it's the other way around. As you keep adding functionality to a program in an imperative language, at some point it will turn into a mess that you can describe as a Rube Goldberg machine. Functional programming allows one to keep one's head cool, and thus you will reach tipping point complexity at a much later stage. FP allows one to build taller buildings. This is what attracts smart people to Haskell.
  - tome 3y ago
    Agreed, I was surprised too. Haskell is the only language I've used in which the codebase doesn't turn into a Rube Goldberg machine in the short amount of time (granted most of that was Python -- maybe it's Python in particular that has a problem).
- xcv123 3y ago
  The Rube Goldberg machine builders will do the same in any language. Give them Java and they will build monstrosities beyond your comprehension. The functional paradigm has its strengths and weaknesses, just like any other paradigm. One of its strengths is facilitating elegant, easily understood, and highly correct code -- but that depends on the developer.
anonzzzies 3y ago
Smart contracts are foot guns and so they are an interesting case for formal verification and advanced static typing people. They usually like Haskell. I like formal verification but not blockchain, however , the jobs are there. Saving actual lives with formal methods is not worth the money, so we prove Ponzi schemes to be correct. A little over the top, sorry, but it is hurting just a tad that chemo delivery devices have less rigid software than something that is marketed as an everyone wins lottery type of thing.
- peterbecich 3y ago
  Yes, to add to this, it was an opportune time at the beginning of a new sector with no legacy code. I've read that iOS Apps benefited in a similar way in security over Mac OS; there was an opportunity to start fresh without backward compatibility requirements.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if a huge factor is just marketing. Most crypto products are only built to be sold to some investor. And saying it's all built on Haskell probably sells better than saying it's a bog standard typescript program.
ActorNightly 3y ago
Insert something about "our coin is secure because we code in a language that prevents programmers from making mistakes".
agumonkey 3y ago
would you rather handling money in php or haskell ?
- icrbow 3y ago
  I've seen a company doing that in Visual Basic. It was successful enough to have a nice office etc.
- wiseowise 3y ago
  I would rather handle money in what I know best.

nh2 3y ago

This is easy to answer, at least for this data set: It contains all job descriptions (see link to Google Sheet, scroll to bottom). From a 30 seconds look, it seems there are around 5 cryptocurrency jobs in the list for year 2022. You will find that currently the list of Haskell companies is quite diverse across industries, which is a big change vs. 10 years ago.

amelius 3y ago

How many are in embedded systems?

shae 3y ago
More than you'd expect, if you like FPGA development. Clash for FPGA work, and several tools from Galois for embedded real time uses.
- amelius 3y ago
  Ok, so it's in the tooling, not in the actual binaries running on embedded systems.
  - shae 3y ago
    Right, same as C but unlike FORTH