Is there any Haskell-land equivalent to the Ruby-land's Bundler et. al and, if not, how would a project so structured be contrived?

Question

Note to readers: Bear with me. I promise there\'s a question.

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I have a problem to solve and think to myself \"Oh, I\'ll do it in Ruby.\"

Answer 1

There are many points here. First, there is a comparison of convention-over-configuration with explicit configuration. In the ruby land, the former is often prefered. In my experience, although it works great for do-a-{blog|social-thing|gem|library}-in-5-minutes-screencast and quick experiments, it has much less value in your real projects (more than 5 minutes) as init time gets quickly amortized. Also, there is a reason why tools provide configuration facilities : there are many different needs and usages. So my advice to your cabal-init problem is : make your own template file. Put stub for everything you need, with great comments, and use it whenever you need it.

Regarding tests, the landscape is quiet different between ruby and haskell. In ruby, one can write foo do { oh dear I am typing nonsense here } and there is no other way to catch this nonsense than actually running the code. So automated tests are absolutely required. In the haskell land however, there is a great static analysis of your code coupled with a very sane paradigm (purely functional non-strict), and after years of using it, I'm still surprised haw hard it is to write nonsense without being immediately caught by the compiler. I do ruby at work as well, and really, 90% of my tests are poor-man manual "static checks".

Still, there is room for wrong design or corner-case errors, that's why quickcheck exists. It will automatically (yes, really automatically) find corner-case errors and help you a lot find design errors. You can still write unit tests with one of existing packages if you need manual checks.

So my conclusion here is : don't be surprised to find shadow everywhere if you shade ruby light on the haskell land. Things are very different over here, and need to be experienced to grab power. That doesn't mean that everything is perfect, actually improving the toolchain is a commonly expressed wish. Just the points you raised are not really problematic, and really don't deserve some vocabulary you picked. Try first, judge after :)

Answer 2

There's currently no one single way to set up a testsuite. Hopefully, people will standardize on cabal test, which is out-of-the box. In fact, both HUnit and QuickCheck are also provided with the Haskell Platform, and so setting up tests doesn't require downloading any extra dependencies.

You're correct that an old accepted answer doesn't provide information on cabal test. I edited it, and now it does! You're also probably correct that the linked page on the Haskell wiki (also written before cabal test became available) doesn't provide information on current testing best practices. It's a wiki, and I encourage folks to edit it! Note that the page does, however, provide a link to another page that describes how one might structure a more complex Haskell project.

tldr; Use cabal test. I'm fond of test-framework, which you can integrate with cabal test should you so desire. Sorry that cabal test is sort of new and not all the resources we have (generally community editable) have been updated to point to it and describe how to use it. Updating lots of resources and creating tutorials is the job of a community. We should probably do a better job promoting lots of the new awesome tools introduced to the Haskell ecosystem in the last few years.