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Comment by alexmingoia | Hacker News Reader

”For a while it has been a public secret the Haskell ecosystem has become increasingly entangled with an unsavoury variety in the cryptocurrency sector as one of primary mechanisms for funding development.”

And those would be? I code in Haskell every day and I have no idea what he’s talking about.

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This is one of those articles that attempts to talk about some situation to make it more common knowledge, but is written in such an incredibly abstract way that all you can really take away from it is 'some unknown people are upset about some unknown issue'.

I feel like this 'elephant in the room' article doesn't tell me what the elephant is, why it's in the room, or why people don't want it to be in the room.

Just look at the final section, quoted:

> Painfully, some of the very founding contributors to Haskell itself are the ones deepest involved in this ring.

> In this new era the Haskell community itself has simply become a tool to buy legitimacy and pump token values. The reputation of our community is now used to defraud the public and convince non-technical users of the soundness of an utterly unsound investment.

> I have avoided names ... however core Haskell companies such as Well-Typed, Tweag and FP Complete have been deeply complicit in building up this crypto industry for years now.

The article isn't easy to skim, and I think that's the point. The author wants to focus more on why cryptocurrency is a scam, and less on who's guilty.

Maybe it's just me, but these sentences are so vague and indirect as to mean nothing to me.

I think it's a shame because if you're going to accuse someone of something, at least make your accusation clear and direct so they can respond to it specifically.

I'm not an expert and I don't do value judgments, but I think he's talking about something called 'smart contracts'. Haskell would make it easier to verify smart contracts. I thought he was talking about use cases like those as Cardano and with "some of the very founding contributors" he meant Philip Wadler (amongst others).

EDIT: didn't want to imply that Cardano is a shady company.

No, he's not talking about the technical features of blockchain. He's talking about the general shadiness of a nontrivial number of actors in the cryptocurrency sector itself, which have had a propensity for deceptive marketing, and even outright fraud.

His concern is that if Haskell gets the reputation of being beholden to these interests it will make the Haskell ecosystem undesirable to legitimate actors.

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.

The collapse of AI research in the 1980's directly caused a decline in Lisp research.

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

Anecdotally, almost every Haskell job posting I've ever seen is for a bank or some kind of cryptocurrency thing. I've never done a real analysis and I don't have any numbers to back that up, that's just what it feels like as someone who passively watches the Haskell job market.

I know dfinity was a big one, they had a huge ICO and lots of haskellers.

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