Can mathematics be developed for nefarious purposes?
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.
The analogy I would make is that there are many mathematicians and computer scientists who are unwilling to work for the CIA, but would be thrilled if a university gave them a lot of funding to research the exact same stuff. The math itself is not nefarious, but the community is.
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.
If you want to use Fortran today, the jobs are essentially all government contracting. If you want to use Haskell today, the jobs are essentially all cryptocurrency. If you don't want to get into government contracting (which is hard to get out of), or if you don't want to do cryptocurrency, you don't get to use Fortran or Haskell.
What happens if the bottom falls out of the cryptocurrency job market? Does Haskell become Scheme, a language used only for language research?
Fortran is used all over for high performance computing, not just in government contracting. Scheme is not only used for language research. A large part of Julia, a pragmatic language for technical computing, is written in Scheme.
> A large part of Julia, a pragmatic language for technical computing, is written in Scheme.
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.
That's from 2012 when the language was in version 0.1. We're now in version 1.4 (1.5 launching soon!). At this point, 3.1% of the julia git repo is femptlisp (scheme), but I can assure you that is not being used for any heavy lifting or scientific computations. It's for the parser.
I think it is too much a reductionist thinking to think it’s the users, not the tools. Math and programming languages (and media like tv or videogames) can easily stand on the sidelines, outside of the range of criticism, by making the claim that it is not the medium, but the users.
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.
Interesting that you brought up mathematics. My shallow view of the haskell community is that they think haskell is/should be as theoretically solid as mathematics. And based on this, my interpretation of the underlying fear in the article is analogous to the Russian government somehow duping all the world's mathematicians to only work on the problem domain of breaking cryptos (and incidentally primarily the type of cryptos used by "enemy" nations) and all the mathematicians dropping everything and going "yeah, that sound super cool let's do that, maybe someone else will pick up my work in combinatorial topography"
Why the Russian government specifically? Plenty of nations do encourage this of (some of) their mathematicians and this practice is also poorly regarded by some.
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.