[Haskell-cafe] Re: State of OOP in Haskell

[Al Falloon]

Alexy Khrabrov wrote:
> Well, I'm thinking in terms of OOD/OOA/OOP -- Design, Architecture,
> Programming.  That's about the only way to model a bog system.  Say I
> have a stock market model -- I'll have a database of tickers, a
> simulator to backtest things, a trading strategy, etc.
> 
> Do Haskell modules provide enough encapsulation to design a system in
> terms of them?  What are the design/architecture units in Haskell if
> not OO-based?

Design of functional programs is very bottom-up. The general plan is to
identify the primitives for your domain and embed them in the language, 
then solve your problems using those primitives. Evolving your 
primitives and program concurrently as you get a better understanding of 
the problem/solution.

A good intro to this kind of programming is 'On Lisp' by Paul Graham 
(http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html). Of course, he is using Lisp 
instead of Haskell so many of the concrete techniques for implementing 
this method are different[*]. However, the first section of the book 
that talks about how you build something "on Lisp" is equally applicable 
to building software "on Haskell".

I expect that in your domain, the primitives are things like: currency, 
time series data, trades, strategies, and so on. The primitive 
operations would let you "perform a trade", "back-test a strategy" and 
so on. Since it is close to your chosen domain, I highly recommend you 
look at 
http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Papers/financial-contracts/contracts-icfp.htm

[*] On Lisp makes heavy use of macros in Lisp, which have no analog in 
Haskell, but can usually be substituted for lazy-evaluation and/or monads

--
Alan Falloon