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.
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.
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.
What happens if the bottom falls out of the cryptocurrency job market? Does Haskell become Scheme, a language used only for language research?
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.
“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...
This is not true, by the way.
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.
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.
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.
I agree it would be great to have more details about how big this influence is and how it manifests itself.
They appear to be funding Haskell development.
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.