[tor-talk] [liberationtech] [p2p-hackers] Programming language for anonymity network

[Brandon Wiley]

> Unfortunately, Stevens requirement of familiarity still speaks

> > against functional programming languages, even for something as
> > popular (and watered-down) as Scala. It's very hard to find code
> > contributors who know the language or are willing to learn it.
>

This used to be true, but is no longer the case. Haskell, Scala, and OCaml
are all sufficiently popular now that it's not a problem to find
developers. Facebook uses Haskell. Twitter uses Scala. Functional
programming has mainstreamed.

As an open source developer that uses Haskell for my projects, I have found
no problems with getting contributions from the community. Particularly in
the anonymity and censorship circumvention space a lot of contributors are
CS students and so have had some exposure to functional programming. Python
programmers in particular will have an easy time as several key language
features such as meaningful indentation, list comprehensions, and
generators were taken from functional languages. What's harder to find is
people that understand the core concepts of building anonymous and
censorship-resistant systems.