Book Image

Soar with Haskell

By : Tom Schrijvers
Book Image

Soar with Haskell

By: Tom Schrijvers

Overview of this book

With software systems reaching new levels of complexity and programmers aiming for the highest productivity levels, software developers and language designers are turning toward functional programming because of its powerful and mature abstraction mechanisms. This book will help you tap into this approach with Haskell, the programming language that has been leading the way in pure functional programming for over three decades. The book begins by helping you get to grips with basic functions and algebraic datatypes, and gradually adds abstraction mechanisms and other powerful language features. Next, you’ll explore recursion, formulate higher-order functions as reusable templates, and get the job done with laziness. As you advance, you’ll learn how Haskell reconciliates its purity with the practical need for side effects and comes out stronger with a rich hierarchy of abstractions, such as functors, applicative functors, and monads. Finally, you’ll understand how all these elements are combined in the design and implementation of custom domain-specific languages for tackling practical problems such as parsing, as well as the revolutionary functional technique of property-based testing. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the key concepts of functional programming and be able to develop idiomatic Haskell solutions.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Basic Functional Programming
6
Part 2: Haskell-Specific Features
11
Part 3: Functional Design Patterns
16
Part 4: Practical Programming

Property-Based Testing

Testing is an important aspect of software quality assurance. It exercises the software to expose bugs, ideally early on in the development process where they can be mitigated relatively cheaply. Unfortunately, there are several negative stereotypes associated with testing: it is seen as tedious, time-consuming, and costly. For these reasons, testing is often looked down upon and neglected.

This negative perception is likely due to a particular testing approach: unit testing. Unit testing is rather labor intensive as individual test inputs and expected outputs have to be devised one by one. Typically, a large suite of such unit tests is needed to test the software thoroughly. Some cleverness can go into choosing appropriate inputs, but on the whole, the challenges are limited and the work rather repetitive.

As Haskell programs can also contain bugs, software testing is recommended. However, instead of resorting to unit testing, we have a much more fun and...