> What is it about Haskell that makes it a hot candidate for use in cryptocurrency applications?
The community opinion is that Haskell is good for building robust and correctly behaving applications. There's some evidence that very strong type systems can help with this.
Financial software is an area where people typically want deep correctness guarantees, another good example area being cryptography.
Between these I think it's probably a good thing that crypto-currency applications and applications like exchanges are being built with "safe" technology like Haskell, rather than technologies that provide much less safety (many Ethereum hacks have boiled down to Solidity contracts being relatively loosely typed).
This is however not an opinion on what crypto is doing to the Haskell ecosystem. I don't know about that.
Apparently there's "right wing" people in Haskell now. This is such a paper thin threat on unspecified persons who must know they're being targeted.
Seriously, I don't think the readership of HN is in any disagreement about how new cryptocurrencies are "short long con" jobs, but the author teases that the influx of this money is toxic to the Haskell community because... right wing people?
The influx of money is toxic because Haskell's traditional reputation (roughly: difficult to learn, but fast, smart & correct) is being co-opted to add a veneer of legitimacy to crypto scams.
I also wouldn't say the problem is to do with "right wing people". Nobody's born with a political affiliation: we learn and digest information and experience all through our lives, swinging towards and away from different values at different times. This can especially depend on our social circles, our information-bubbles, what benefits us personally, etc.
The crypto-bubble tends to discourage regulation, accountability, etc. which makes it attractive to right-wing politics, whether as a libertarian free-for-all; or money-laundering for the gentry; or whatever. When this sector has an outsized influence on a particular community, the political gradient will be tilted accordingly, and bias people's random walks to the right.
Haskell may be great at solving the technical problems with crypto, but that doesn't solve its ethical or philosophical problems. Yet, as the old saying goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it".
Are you saying that cryptoscammers are "right wing", or that threatening cryptoscammers to get rid of them is "right wing"? In what sense dealing with "unsavory varieties" can be considered a partisan issue?
The community opinion is that Haskell is good for building robust and correctly behaving applications. There's some evidence that very strong type systems can help with this.
Financial software is an area where people typically want deep correctness guarantees, another good example area being cryptography.
Between these I think it's probably a good thing that crypto-currency applications and applications like exchanges are being built with "safe" technology like Haskell, rather than technologies that provide much less safety (many Ethereum hacks have boiled down to Solidity contracts being relatively loosely typed).
This is however not an opinion on what crypto is doing to the Haskell ecosystem. I don't know about that.