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Comment by bondarchuk | Hacker News Reader

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 development, for unparalleled security and stability."), however it would be interesting to have some examples of haskell developments that are fueled specifically by cryptocurrency applications. FTA: "the economic machinery that shapes everything we do and informs the problems we chose to spend our cycles on"; what are these specific problems?

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> very little haskell-specific clarifications

This is about Haskell-the-ecosystem, not Haskell-the-technology. In that way I think it's a valuable contribution.

Stephen is a well known and respected part of the Haskell ecosystem, and has written many popular blog posts about the language and ecosystem.

I agree. Cardano and Pact are fine projects.

Pact (a not complete Turing language for blockchain) is also interesting Haskell code to read and to learn from.

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

> however it would be interesting to have some examples of haskell developments that are fueled specifically by cryptocurrency applications

An article saying "this sector of our community is bad and scamming retail investors" is already burning MAD BRIDGES and putting an enormous target on your back.

"Bob Smith and Joe Brown, specifically, are scamming retail investors" is going even a little beyond that. It's just not necessary.

EDIT: For the writer of the article, that is. We in the peanut gallery obviously want all the details, which is why a little detective work is often required in these cases.

> very little haskell-specific clarifications

The author mentions at least three Haskell-related companies, such as FP Complete, and says he wants to avoid naming specific people for the time being.

If the only charge is that haskell consulting companies are writing code for cryptocurrency projects, then I have misunderstood the article first time around. I assumed the problem was with developments in the haskell language itself.

Exactly this. The article is not about the Haskell language itself -- i.e. not a rant about technical issues -- but about its community and consulting companies getting (allegedly) entangled with crypto businesses. "Making a deal with the devil".

That's why the author rants about crypto and not about Haskell itself.

I am not sure what is "alleged" about Haskell consultancies getting cryptocurrency money. It is pretty easy to confirm. Both Well-Typed and FP Complete got money from Cardano and posted to their blog what amount to advertisements for Cardano. Google a bit if you care.

"Alleged" as in "the article claims this, but I personally haven't double-checked it so don't want to make my post sound as I myself were sure this was the case". "Alleged" doesn't mean "unfounded".

I've written enough comments on HN to know that if I don't word it this way, someone will inevitably start arguing with me as if the assertion was mine.

"...posted to their blog what amount to advertisements for Cardano."

And that would seem to be exactly what Stephen is complaining about.

It does affect Haskell language itself (GHC anyway). See moomin's comment.

This is an article about a giant pot of questionably earned money buying influence in a software ecosystem that he's been a big part of. But this is hardly the first time for this, in other cases the pot of questionably earned money came from selling people's data for ads or from Windows licenses.

The question in all of these cases is what specific bad influences the money can have on the software ecosystem and how community standards and governance can mitigate them. I don't really see a lot of answers in this article besides ill-defined ethical compromise of developers. I skimmed the book he mentioned (The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism) which sounds interesting but it doesn't really make its own case very well: half of the "extremist" citations are from anonymous online commenters and you can't go 2 paragraphs without straight up name-calling and ham-fisted guilt by association.

It's not buying influence, it's "blood money" -- profiting from crime by selling things to criminals. When Prada sells luxury clothes to drug lords, the problem isn't that the drug lords influence Prada

There is degree of questionableness and I think it makes sense to say that some money is more questionably earned than others.

https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/2231

is an example.

Key word here is Asterius. Cardano is funding Asterius, Haskell to WebAssembly compiler, Asterius is based on GHC, and changes convenient for Asterius are being merged to GHC.

This isn't really true - several members of the team have been contributing to GHC since before Cardano was a thing.

There is no contradiction here. I didn't claim Cardano started Asterius. But it definitely is funding it.

tweag is funding Asterius.

There is also DAML: https://github.com/digital-asset/daml

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

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