[Haskell-cafe] Type System vs Test Driven Development

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

Jonathan Geddes wrote:

> I know that much of my code could benefit from a property test or two
> on the more complex parts, but other than that I can't think that unit
> testing will improve my Haskell code/programming practice.

One other thing I should mention that is that since a lot of
Haskell code is purely functional its actually easier to test
than imperative code and particularly OO code.

The difficulties in unit testing OO code is coaxing objects
into the correct state to test a particular property. Usually
this means a whole bunch of extra code to implement mock
objects to feed the right data to the object under test.

By contrast, much Haskell code is purely functional. With
pure functions there is no state that needs to be set up. For
testing pure functions, its just a matter of collecting a set
of representative inputs and making sure the correct output is
generated by each input. For example, Don Stewart reported that
the XMonad developers conciously made as much of the XMonad code
pure so it was more easily testable.

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/