Review: Simon Peyton Jones on Type-driven Testing in Haskell

Simon Peyton Jones gave a talk at the Cambridge BCS-SPA group on testing with functional languages (esp. Haskell). (Someone’s already posted the video and slides; careful it’s large!).

Some important points:

• Future of programming will be about “Control of (Side) Effects”
• Programming languages will become more functional than imperative
• Purity is good for understanding, verification, maintenance,
• Purity pays back in performance, parallelism, testing
• Functional/value-oriented is easier to test than object-oriented stateful
• Functional is good for generating tests (domain-specific language)

After a short intro into Haskell (10 min Haskell 101:)) SPJ moved onto testing in Haskell. In his demo, he tested a programme that would pack 7-bit words into 8-bits, so that eight ASCII characters would take up only 7 byte instead of 8. This sort of space saving is done in SMS where bandwith is precious.

One fundamental test tried to assert that unpack(pack(x))==x. After testing some hand-written cases, which succeeded, the test started to use randomly generated words and started to fail after after a few hundred attempts. Due to its random nature, it took a randomly varying number of cases, but typically it failed after less than a 1000 cases. (It turned out that words of 8-byte length ending in a particular bit sequence were not correctly packed.)

The beauty of the underlying Haskell testing framework was that it took very few lines of code to express a generic testing framework.

The talk also showed that sometimes testing with large random test data is necessary to find bugs; something we rarely do!?

Overall, I found the speaker very engaging and the talk enjoyable even if I won’t claim of having understood or remembered everything.