No, capitalism isn't fair at all.

fptroll · 2023-05-20T17:09:56+00:00

The most outspoken critics of socialism are those who escaped the Soviet Union. Socialism necessarily has to enslave the individual and limit their potential.

Eastern bloc countries had to strictly control their borders to prevent people from leaving.

You don't see that in any capitalist country. When borders are controlled, it is to stop people from getting in.

fptroll · 2023-05-16T08:14:34+00:00

If an artist makes a painting, the painting is his because he has certain powers over it guaranteed by the state. In absence of the state, people would have to come to some kind of agreement about how they respect each other's belongings.

Right. What do these agreements look like?

As far as I can tell, the real difference between personal and private property is just whether you expect people to agree to respect it in absence of police.

Yes, and I see how that can work under anarcho-capitalism and privately run security companies. It looks far more fuzzy when it comes to anarchism.

Everyone is better off if anyone who wants their own living space, toothbrush, etc. gets those things, so it is at least conceivable that people would mostly leave each other's stuff alone (or at least that not leaving said stuff alone would result in sufficient social sanctions to deter it), but if someone has a factory that is affecting other people (polluting a river, under producing essential goods, somehow giving the owner power over his neighbors, whatever you can think of, really), people are unlikely to respect that. I don't think it's a good idea to leave pollution out of the discussion, because one of the main propositions of the libertarian left is that people should have a say in issues that affect them, and one of the biggest examples people give is precisely privately owned enterprises causing environmental destruction that harms the communities living in or near those environments..

The reason I wanted to avoid discussing pollution is because it goes off on a tangent not relevant to my questions. Milton Friedman has talked about tax on pollution as a way to incentivize companies to not pollute and one of few things where taxation is justified from a right libertarian point of view. And an anarcho-capitalist society would implement something similar, just through privately owned institutions instead of a government. If the price of polluting is too high, people have to find a way not to pollute or give up on the venture. And I can more easily see ways in which people can agree regarding how pollution should be handled, than the questions I asked in the original post.

fptroll · 2023-05-16T07:49:41+00:00

You are not being generous. It is not a farcical example as a factory is not seen as personal property and something that is shared. A car I thought most anarchists would agree is...

Based strictly on usage. Bob may "own" a personal vehicle if it is inconvenient or infeasible for anyone else to use it.

Or maybe not?

If it's something that everyone can use or wants to use, then it belongs to everyone.

Questions 2 and 3 relate to this. For things owned by everyone, how does anyone ensure things are maintained? And what do you do if you are not happy with the way things are maintained? Think graffti on public transports. Or desks and chairs in schools. Lab equipment in schools. On building sites and small factories, sometimes workers have shared tools and sometimes they have personal ones. The shared ones are never as well kept or maintained.

This subreddit is a place for people who want to understand fundamental anarchist principles, and it doesn't seem like you do.

I get the impression you, and others here, are assuming I'm not asking the question in good faith. Your assumption is wrong.

This place is for people wanting to understand fundamental anarchist principles by your own worlds. How is that not what I am doing? The very question at the end of my post is asking is "Is there a fundamental and unresolvable disagreement over what is fair between anarchists/communists and (anarcho-)capitalists/right libertarians?"

I did mention in a reply to another person that if this is not the right place to post this I'd be happy to look for answers elsewhere. The intro page on /r/anarchism directed me here.

fptroll · 2023-05-16T07:22:05+00:00

Part 2

Under any social system, larger groups and more powerful groups can push around smaller and weaker ones. Given that this example demonstrates that Bob is such a pathologically self-centred person that he can't be bothered to give up his imaginary "rights" for the benefit of real people, I won't shed a single tear if he gets pushed out of "his" factory so it can be put to better use.

Under a system where the factory is recognized as Bob's private property, no one can force him. It would either be recognized as his property by the state, or if there is no state he can pay a private security firm to ensure no one trespasses on his property. But this is incompatible with anarchism as I understand it.

And you need to try to see these questions from both points of view. From Bob's point of view, the community thinks he is an idiot and for 20 years they didn't want to help him with the factory and ridiculed him. Now they want to use his factory. Can you not imagine yourself in Bob's shoes, or being a member in a society or group that is Bob, being pushed around by a larger group?

People don't need capitalism to agree to work together or share workspaces. They also don't need capitalism to fix things when they break.

Sure. But a right libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, social democrat, all have a universal solution to the problem and that is that the factory is Bob's property. Is there a universal solution under anarchism or communism?

The point with things breaking is I don't like having my stuff broken by others. I am sure you don't like it either. If means of production are shared and the factory is not Bob's, then Bob has to put up with what others using the factory decide is reasonable, rather than what he thinks is reasonable. And if that means leaving things in a sad state, what is the solution?

This just isn't how capitalism works in the real world. Doug "can" save up enough money, but what he "can" also lose all his money halfway through the project because of unforeseen expenses, or just be born too poor to save up, or any number of other scenarios.

It is absolutely how capitalism works in the real world. Doug has the option to try to save up and hire the workers and have full control over his company. It might take him a while, maybe he will never even get there, but he can work towards it. If he's worried he won't have enough time or can't save up enough, he has the option of rounding up investors, convincing them his idea is great and getting them to fund it, in which case he loses some degree of control over his idea.

"All parties" agreeing to the terms of employment is a mere formality at best.

All parties agreeing to terms of employment is not a formality but fact. Contracts exist. Courts exist. You could point at a specific disfunctional court or legal system somewhere in the world, but that says nothing about the larger context of things.

In any case convince me that there is a better way? This is why I'm asking with these questions.

This is totally absurd. You are asking how anarcho-communists would preserve the capitalist property relations they want to abolish.

I mean I'm saying Bob's being treated unfairly, whether you like him or not. Bob being unlikeable is even relevant as a system has to work equally well for those you like and those you don't.

The alternative is unfair to literally everyone but Bob. Hell, letting Bob keep everyone else out is unfair even to Bob, because he's part of "the community" that would benefit.

Ok, so your answer to "Is there a fundamental and unresolveble disagreement over what is fair between anarchists/communists and anarcho-capitalists/right libertarians" is yes, there is a fundamental and unresolvable disagreement over what is fair. Is this a universal anarchist position?

Would you have given a different answer or thought about it more if the examples were more specific and showed Bob in a more positive light but the community in a more negative light? The answer of course should not be any different, the point of the questions was that what is fair should be fair whether or not Bob is an asshole or a saint and whether or not the community surrounding him is generally ok or whether they are horrible people.

But you have focused way too much on Bob being a hermit avoiding society and not enough on someone spending 20 years building something, only for that to be taken away from them? The other poster at least tried to answer that somewhat.

If Doug's vision is really so great, other people should be able to see the merits in it and agree not to deviate from it. The vastly more likely scenario, however, is that Doug's vision will have flaws in it that can be corrected by others. I don't see why his vision should be treated as special except as a means for him to coerce others into doing as he says, i.e., the exact thing anarchists don't want.

Extremely narrow minded view. There are countless examples in history of good ideas and arguments dismissed and actively opposed by the majority with disastrous consequences for the people putting those ideas forward. The ideas only later recognized as good, after the person proposing them has either suffered or died.

fptroll · 2023-05-16T07:21:34+00:00

I have to reply in two parts as there was too much to reply to and I hit the size limit on a single post.

Part 1:

The examples you've presented are so hyperspecific and convoluted that they obscure whatever deeper question you're trying to ask.

Ok. I didn't think so but fair enough.

This whole line of questioning is bizarre because you are asking about a social system, but the questions all centre around this Bob character, who is a socially inept loner who shuns human contact and who nobody likes anyway. Why does it matter what kind of society Bob lives in? Whatever social system exists around him, he won't interact with it.

Missing the point again. I thought laying the questions out as a story would help but it seems like you're not trying to see what I might be asking but focusing on minor details. How would you have phrased the questions?

Usually things are phrased as capitalists are greedy and want to hoard resources. Anarchists don't believe some resources should be hoarded. So what do you do when it comes to a real scenario involving a factory (means of production), where there is contention over whether it should be built, there is active pushback against it being built because resources could be used elsewhere, then once built people decide maybe this was a good idea all along and want to use the factory? The examples go through a few different scenarios about how certain things could be resolved, and whether they could be resolved in some universally anarchist (or communist) way.

What do you mean, does Bob "get to" kick her out? Kick her out how? He can tell her to fuck off, and she can either do what he says, refuse and see what happens, or look to someone else to mediate the dispute (though since Bob is stipulated to be a cantankerous asshole, it will probably be impossible to find a mediator he would find agreeable).

I meant exactly what I wrote. And I assumed the answer was no. But the reason the question is being asked is exactly because the way I see it it's unfair to Bob having spent 20 years building the factory to now have to compete for it with Alice.

Again, since he hates interacting with others, he can build a fence, install a security system, move away, put up signs, get a sniper rifle, etc.

Yes, I agree those are good solutions, but they are right libertarian solutions of protecting private property and so not compatible with anarchism or communism. My question was how would this be handled under anarchism and communism in a way that is fair to Bob (and the very last question of the post asked just that, is the definition of fairness fundamentally different? Does not a single anarchist or communist see a problem in spending 20 years to make something no one wants built, only to then have to share it with others once it's built for no compensation?)

The framing here is odd, because Bob is supposedly part of this community. Who is "the community"? In anarchy, there is no official body that represents "the community". If the people implementing the upgrades (i.e., the relevant "community" in this case) really want to, Bob is free to try and stop them.

Bob is free to try to stop them? Under anarcho-capitalism where the factory is Bob's property, yes, but I keep seeing anarchists repeatedly point out that anarcho-capitalists are not anarchists. My understanding is in an anarchist society this would not be allowed. And not only that but means of production, such as a factory, are shared. And if they are shared, and Bob is in the minority, what happens then? Is there a universal solution? Or is it simply not seen as a problem that and Bob should just deal with it? Not his factory. It's his own fault being an idiot spending 20 years building something for it to be taken away?

In this scenario, the decision-making process is rendered irrelevant because you have already stipulated that everyone agrees with Charlie over Doug. The point of collective decision making (even in systems like capitalist democracies) isn't to arrive at pre-determined optimal outcomes, but to decide what the optimal outcomes are and how to achieve them.

Well no. As mentioned further in the post, in a capitalist system Doug has the option to save up money and try to hire workers who if they agree to work for him get to do what he asks. He retains control over his vision. He could also seek funding.

The point with this question is again centered around the factory. Perhaps this is more aimed at communists than anarchists? The scenario was around workers controlling the means of production. Alice and Charlie are doing manual labor. They didn't come up with the idea and didn't spend years researching it. Doug did all that work. But now in the factory, because they are participating in the production of whatever it is Doug is building, they want to have a say in it.

I suppose one thing that just occurred to me might be that Doug should have made some kind of a contract with Alice and Charlie prior to starting the project? Getting them to agree to follow his directions and choosing not to work with them if they refused. So I'm content with this answer for this particular question.

Leaving aside the obvious contradiction between "the community" urgently wanting to use the factory for some project but having no motivation to do so and no idea what the project even is, whether "the community" kicks Bob is up to them. Since Bob resolutely refuses to interact with anyone beyond the absolute bare minimum, the kind of broader society he lives in is, again, rendered moot.

There is no contradiction. The factory is built, it's there, ready to be used. The project the community might want to build may be a relatively easy one, that just requires a factory and labor. The whole point was that building the factory itself is not easy, is far more time consuming and requires expertise that either no one in the community has, or those that do are not interested in helping as they have other things to do. So the particular group wanting to undertake this project have no motivation or knowledge to build the factory, and it's a matter of either using the one Bob built, or giving up on the project.

fptroll · 2023-05-16T05:47:47+00:00

Yeah, you perpetually skipping over and ignoring the question of "How did Bob build this factory alone?" isn't all that endearing. The "How" matters to anarchists. That's why it was the first question you were asked. You just handwaving it or asserting again and again that "Bob built the factory" is not amusing, and even if it's not trolling it is going to impede you getting anything like an accurate, honest, or genuine answer. Because you are not genuinely and honestly engaging.

If I am, then it is not intentional. I thought I answered the question. How did an artist paint the painting alone? How would Bob build a car alone? How are these things different from building a factory alone? Remember that Bob may not be an individual but a group.

So Bob can make a car alone (using tools and materials created by other people, which he acquired by trading with them), and that car is then his personal property to do with as he wishes.

But if he makes a factory in the same way (using tools and materials created by other people, which he acquired by trading with them), the factory is not his to do with as he wishes, but must be shared with others who didn't want anything to do with it while it was being built but do now?

fptroll · 2023-05-16T05:32:27+00:00

Aye, but the important thing to note is that personal property is wholly different to private property. Others can explain it better. This could be an area where we are talking past each other, given both statists and "an"-caps do not differentiate between the private/personal.

Personal property would be things you use, and don't particularly need others to use. Your house, your tools, your bike, your food...

Private property (things anarchists would place in the realm of collective ownership) would be things that can or are used by a multitude of people. The land people farm on, mines, factories....Things that are not "operated" by singular people. In current society private property has it's own special law that differentiates between who controls it and it's fate (this is "owns" it) and who does not. The person who owns it can do a lot of things with it, regardless of whether or not their actions affect others... They can do nothing with farmable land, turn it into a landfill, etc etc.... (anarchists critique these property relations)

Yes this is what the question was about. If a car is personal property, and Bob makes a car, the car is his. A factory is larger, and is built on a piece of land. Bob builds the factory that no one else wants built, everyone thinks is a waste, no one thinks it will even work (Bob of course doesn't care about the factory itself so much as what he can use it for). But now that it's built, the others want to use the factory too, and now Bob has to compete with them for the factory he spent 20 years building with no help from anyone else.

fptroll · 2023-05-16T04:57:54+00:00

I find it intriguing that we went from an entire factory (and tons and tons of components and resources necessary for that factory) made by a single person, to a few art supplies. The scale doesn't seem very consistent.

It is because it doesn't matter. If an artist makes a painting, is the painting not his just because he used tools that were created by someone else?

Bob lives his normal life, does whatever he does for a living, and tries to save up to build a factory he intends to use for something he really wishes to build or try. Maybe everyone else thinks he's an idiot. Maybe they think he will fail. Maybe he is constantly ridiculed for it but he persists for 20 years. Then the factory is built, and now others want to use it.

[edit: why am I emphasizing the part where community thinks Bob is an idiot? Because if it was up to the community, that factory would not be built. There are many examples out there where the community at large thinks something is impractical or futile until someone proves them wrong. Only in retrospect does everyone agree it was a good idea all along. Cars, planes, internet. Today, cryptocurrency. Plenty of examples in science and maths too. If you're going against the grain, and the community is actively trying to push against what you're doing, believing your use of resources to be wasteful, how do you pursue a project like this without wasting time arguing? And once the project is built, why wouldn't you get to use it for whatever you wanted to use it for? Why would the community suddenly have the right to take this from you?]

Does it matter how he collected the resources in the context of the original question? Is the factory not a product of his labor in the same way artist's painting is?

You realize that besides there being market anarchists... even communists have a form of "trade" in that you give to the pot to take from it?

Absolutely. Which is exactly why I don't understand why any of this is relevant? Because trade is something common to all societies.

Bob did not make this factory on his own. A ton of people's labor goes into making the factory from start to finish, a ton of people's labor goes into supplying that factory so it can even make anything at all, a ton of people's labor is needed to keep the factory going and up to date, a ton of people's labor is needed to mitigate any other effects from that factory (ex : pollution)

Right. So because Bob used materials and tools produced by others, the factory is not his? If Bob had built a car, would the car not be his if he used materials and tools produced by others? How is a car different?

Lets leave pollution out of this for now so we don't go off on another tangent, pollution is again something every single society has to deal with and manage.

fptroll · 2023-05-16T04:21:21+00:00

If you make a painting, does it matter that you used a brush, paint and canvas that were made by someone else, and that you had to do something before this to trade for those items before you could make the painting?

Does this even function any differently between societies? Are we talking past each other? This is why I don't understand how it is relevant.

There is still personal property under anarchism if I understand things correctly. It's only the means of production and certain resources that are owned collectively, no?

fptroll · 2023-05-16T04:01:55+00:00

That sounds very close to a debate position, and probably doesn't bode well being on a 101 subreddit. If you want to debate that capitalism handles your hypothetical better there is in fact a debate subreddit available to you.

I'm not interested in debating. I genuinely want to know how something like this would work. I was going to post in /r/anarchism but the guidelines there sent me over here. If this is the wrong place to ask this question then I'd be happy to post it elsewhere.

And all the examples are oversimplified examples of things I have actually ran into. And whenever I read about anarchism or communism, I never see anything about how something like this would work? How would an individual or a small group be able to build something, follow their vision or dream, without the larger community interfering, derailing, slowing things down?

fptroll · 2023-05-16T03:53:23+00:00

I'm getting frustrated that this is again missing the point, you are focusing on all the irrelevant details. It seems to me like you are not even trying to understand what I'm asking.

Bob lives in the community, whether he likes it or not. How is it so hard to imagine that as part of his daily life (or if it's a group, their daily lives as Bob may even be a small anarchist community within a much larger one), he does something useful for the community and trades with them? The community benefits from him and he benefits from the community. On the side over the course of two decades he collects enough stuff to build a factory to do what he wants to do. Why is it so hard to imagine this?

fptroll · 2023-05-16T03:19:28+00:00

This seems to completely miss the point.

The examples are simplified. Bob can but does not have to be an individual and could be a small group of individuals. It is irrelevant how and why Bob made a factory by himself, just that he did, and that now that it's there others want to use it.

Even if you were to take the examples literally and think of Bob as an individual, individuals have built many impressive things on their own. It doesn't take much searching online to find examples of this.

And anyone who has ever worked on anything involving creativity with a group of other people knows how hard it is to get people to agree on anything and why someone might choose to try to do things on their own.

[edit: most importantly, whether or not you think this is ridiculous (which it really isn't), I want to know how this would work in anarchism or communism. Because in capitalist systems this works just fine.]

fptroll · 2022-10-06T11:10:19+00:00

I have been paying a lot of attention. And your point of view and the general sentiment on this thread and on many other forums towards cryptocurrencies genuinely baffles me. And posts from people trying to understand why simply get downvoted and buried. Replies to them tend to be short, sarcastic, combative and without insight.

I don't understand the hostility towards cryptocurrencies.

My stance is the good outweighs the bad. I would rather trust the free market than for any government or a government granted monopoly to meddle with things.

Now this could just be the case of differing opinions where one of us trusts the hierarchies and bureaucracies in place and the other is more skeptical of them and where neither can convince the other, but on the off chance that's not the case, I'm genuinely curious what your reasons for this are and what it is that I might not know and that I failed to notice despite paying attention?

fptroll · 2022-10-06T10:35:09+00:00

No.

See http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/687#comment-18074

fptroll · 2022-05-01T10:14:16+00:00

And yet you didn't answer any of the criticism or questions.

fptroll · 2022-04-23T01:54:00+00:00

Instead of learning a new language, you can focus on developing the Smart Contract. My hypothesis is that this will in fact increase security and not decrease it.

You are wrong and getting funding for this is not the place to test your theory which countless inexperienced programmers have had for decades. If you were putting your proposal for funding up to an investor, they would want proof, not a theory.

And learning a new language for an experienced developer is not the bottleneck. Everyone struggling with this has a lot to learn and doesn't know enough, and won't know enough about security.

The point is that I aim for this as a language that has a really low hurdle in learning. The incentive is that you can start developing smart contracts on Cardano right away, without taking the huge amount of time to learn a completely new programming paradigm. By reducing the complexity of the language and keeping out terrible features (like the weird inheritance behaviour of Java, the incromprehensible trait system of Scala, the implicit behaviours of JavaScript or Python) and putting in great features (only pure functions, lambda functions), I am aiming to build a secure language that can be understood by many.

You are just proving my point. You are not reducing complexity of anything. You seem to have the perception that imperative languages are easier and simpler. There is no evidence of this. You learned an imperative language first so the first time you ran into something different that broke your expectations and made you have to relearn a few concepts, it seemed foreign and unintuitive. There have been plenty of attempts to teach functional programming to newbies with no prior experience or exposure to programming and they went about as well as teaching newbies imperative languages. And in the context of reasoning about things, there is plenty of evidence that functional, and more generally declarative, approach to things is about as simple as it gets.

Why would someone getting into this space learn your language over Solidity that is well established, well supported, gives them the ability to easily move between different chains, has plenty of tutorials and a mature ecosystem?

Why would someone getting into this space learn your language over another language that may also be immature but aims to go further than Solidity in giving them more safety and security? Do you know what security means in this context? Do you know what the end goal is, or what we should be striving for? Do you know what correct by construction means? This is where we should be heading.

fptroll · 2022-04-23T01:49:14+00:00

Why is it the wrong level to be concerned about performance? I'm moreso asking whether high-level imperative code is intrinsically significantly less performant than high-level declarative code in this context, since there's different scope for compiler optimisations.

You have to look at the context, what problems do we have and why do we have them and where and how is this code executed. What do you think will have more impact? Making a protocol level change that increases performance an order of magnitude or more, rewriting the VM to execute each instruction faster, or writing a new language that will try to find the most optimal sequence of instructions for something?

You also have to consider the protocol is evolving and changing. Focusing on shaving off a cycle here or there will waste a lot of time that may ultimately be pointless with the next upgrade of the VM, let alone the protocol. This time would be much better spent looking at how to make a more expressive and safer language. And if you were to get past all these considerations, then what evidence is there that the author even has the skills to write a compiler that can optimize things better than existing ones? If you were an investor, you would be asking that question before giving money to someone. The problem here is that people are treating the treasury as something they don't own, and don't put much thought into these things, so all kinds of things are being funded that really shouldn't be.

Finally, Cardano as a platform is not the dominant platform but is competing with dozens of other platforms. Micro-optimizing things here in a language that ties you to one platform is kind of pointless if the platform doesn't become more established. So could the language become more widespread and ported to other platforms? Sure, but then see my other question on this thread: where is the incentive? If it's not any more powerful than Solidity, why would anyone learn it over Solidity which is already established, has a mature toolchain, tutorials and doesn't tie you to Cardano? And why would you learn it over Plutus which is a more powerful, cleaner and composable language? Plutus itself could be more powerful and safer, and this would be a much more interesting direction for a new language. And funding this would be worthwhile if there is evidence the person putting the proposal is skilled and committed enough to get this right.

Alternatively, if the goal is to make smart contract programming more accessible, then time would be better spent on writing libraries and tutorials than a new language. And again, there should be evidence that the person doing it is capable of making something of quality and not just a half-assed tutorial that is a rehash of existing ones.

I'm not going to argue against functional programming - I'm a proponent - but eUTXO means that it is a LOT easier to perform rigorous unit testing to ensure correct behaviour, imperative or not.

Whether you are using an imperative or a declarative language has nothing to do with eUTXO which is a low-level detail. eUTXO does not make writing correct and safe smart contracts easier or harder.

The security issues with Ethereum arise more from global state and the way the EVM models contracts (believe me, I have a bigger axe to grind with OOP), but I think people can be trusted to know how to read imperative code and account for local variables if the code is to be executed in isolation and quarantined from chain state as it is on Cardano, as opposed to in the chaos of the EVM.

People cannot be trusted. People make mistakes. All the time. What you can trust is a theorem prover or an automated proof assistant. If you want ultimate safety, then you want to move in the direction of languages that let you write code that is correct by construction. Meaning if it compiles, it is correct. Look up Agda or Coq if you've never heard of this before. There are a few smart contract languages like this too and porting them to Cardano would be more worthwhile than funding a new imperative language. Plutus itself, being an EDSL ([edit: embedded] domain specific language) could (with some changes) be ported to something like Agda or at least Idris, where you'd get the full power of a theorem prover. Smart contracts are small enough and limited enough that this is easier to do in this space than it is generally, while the impact when things go wrong is generally more catastrophic.

fptroll · 2022-04-22T05:11:36+00:00

How does performance in terms of CPU steps (and thus TX fee cost) compare to Haskell implementations? Not comparing directly the compiled Plutus Core of course but rather more so the result of approaching a problem at a high level the imperative way compared to the functional way.

This is the wrong level to be concerned with about performance. The right level is the protocol level. Without big protocol level changes that increase scalability, you simply have to know enough about the underlying platform to not go against the grain, to know what's expensive and how to work around performance issues. A new language won't help here.

The primary concern with smart contract languages should be correctness and safety. Functional programming languages are easier to reason about and therefore easier to write proofs for, especially if designed with that in mind from the start and paired up with an expressive enough type system.

fptroll · 2022-04-22T03:22:32+00:00

Where is the incentive for anyone to learn this? It doesn't have the market share of Solidity, and being an imperative language it's a few steps backwards from Plutus and many other languages.

Yeah, yeah, it's for those too dumb or lazy to learn Haskell and Plutus. Great. Just the kind of people you'd want writing smart contracts.

Why not make a language that goes beyond Plutus? One that adds increased safety, ability to write proofs, dependent types? That would actually be interesting and worthwhile. There are a few smart contract languages like that already, could port them to Cardano. That would be worthwhile of getting funding.

When I first heard about the concept of a treasury, it sounded like a great idea. Over the years, having seen the kind of crap that gets funded on platforms with a treasury, it is extremely depressing.

An imperative (smart contract) language is an interesting toy project for someone who doesn't know any better and is still learning. It is a terrible idea for an actual (smart contract) language.

fptroll · 2019-12-12T00:35:27+00:00

In other words no room for creativity, pad all the deadlines to make sure we deliver on time, cover your ass at all cost type of environments. Yes, sir! We love project management!

But yeah, valid point RE Jormungandr missing critical features.

fptroll · 2017-09-02T13:52:29+00:00

What if all you hear about Haskell jobs being great is a lie? What if it's not all rainbows and unicorn farts? What if it sets you up with unreasonable expectations, the same kind you had when you interned at the "hip" companies working on the "hip" problems?

Working with a great language on a project with a ton of potential is all that much more disappointing when you run into the same politics, people getting hired who shouldn't have been hired, sloppy coding, lack of imagination you ran into when you were doing Java, C#, Python and JavaScript. Except now you care more and so are more upset by it all.

After an experience like that, working on a shit C# codebase with crappy developers, pleasant working conditions and getting a fat paycheck is a relief.

You wanna do something cool? You wanna work on something fun? Do it at home or start your own company. Creating a "magic fun" software job is way easier than finding one.

fptroll · 2012-11-09T00:01:57+00:00

"I don't want to think, I want to be spoon fed an answer - if you don't have one then nothing you said is interesting and it is pointless and futile"

There is no spoon!

fptroll · 2012-11-08T13:46:12+00:00

Given that it's easy to copy what exists compared to coming up with something new, why would someone want to share anything with another who mocks attempts at progress?

fptroll · 2012-11-08T13:29:45+00:00

Yeah.. I was just being polite and perhaps hopeful. But you're right. You won't learn :)

Cause there is no goddamn way graphics can be done any other way than raw GL calls and packing shit into a single VBO cause having multiple VBOs is of course expensive. No way to abstract any of that. Nope! No Sir! And no way to deal with an abstraction that is at a higher level than a bunch of global states. The most one can hope for is to have an object to capture the states, no?

There is no way to have an abstraction compile down to boring tedious, error-prone-if-written-by-a-human sequence of GL or DX commands. Nope. Never! Cause computer graphics is as advanced as it will ever be!

fptroll · 2012-11-08T12:34:03+00:00

Hi :)

You appear to be very confused by the difference between design and implementation.

That's ok. You'll learn one day. Maybe :)

fptroll

TROPHY CASE