[Haskell-cafe] Type System vs Test Driven Development

[Jake McArthur]

On 01/05/2011 03:44 AM, Jonathan Geddes wrote:
> When I write Haskell code, I write functions (and monadic actions)
> that are either a) so trivial that writing any kind of unit/property
> test seems silly, or are b) composed of other trivial functions using
> equally-trivial combinators.

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to 
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the 
other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious 
deficiencies." -- C.A.R. Hoare

If you actually manage to do the former, I'd say you don't need to test 
those parts in isolation.

That said, I disagree with you overall. The Haskell type system is 
simply not rich enough to guarantee everything you might need. Even if 
it was, it would take a lot of work to encode all your invariants, 
probably more work than writing tests would have been (although there 
are obvious advantages to the former as far as having a high level of 
assurance that your code is correct).

Haskell has some awesome testing tool, and I highly recommend getting 
acquainted with them. In particular, you should definitely learn how to 
use QuickCheck, which allows you to easily check high-level properties 
about your code; this is beyond what most traditional unit tests could 
hope to achieve. I tend to use QuickCheck, SmallCheck, *and* 
LazySmallCheck in my test suites, as I feel that they complement each 
other well. HUnit is probably the main one for traditional unit tests. I 
admit I have never used it, and I'm not sure whether I'm missing out on 
anything. There are also some pretty nice test frameworks out there to 
help you manage all your tests, although they could probably use a 
little more work overall.

- Jake