[Haskell-cafe] An idea to document inter department dependencies in Haskell

[C K Kashyap]

My dear Haskell folks,

I work in a software company where I develop components that go into a
really complex system that's built of several components developed by
different teams that are geographically distributed. The components
themselves run in a distributed manner across client and several servers.
All our design documents are in wiki's (fashionably so). As a result of the
above situation and the fact that our code base is not in Haskell, we are
almost always dealing with "Oh I did not know this would effect that" and
"Oh I have no clue what all this change will impact".

I've been wondering if it would be a good idea to try and create a spec for
the system in Haskell, such that would could get a better handle on the
dependencies. Perhaps an EDSL, that would allow Product Managers to
introduce new requirements - compilation failures would indicate the areas
that would need to be touched. How is it different from having a spec in a
diagram - well, in that case, we are requiring humans to look at the
diagram to detect dependencies instead of the compiler telling me about the
dependencies. I am about to start off with some implementation to capture
my idea - I can articulate it better then. However, I just wanted to throw
it out there to check if anyone's had some thought in this direction or if
there is some prior art here.

Regards,
Kashyap
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