the arc of software bends towards understanding
A short public service announcement: you might think you don’t need Cabal. Oh, you might be just whipping up a tiny throw-away script, or a small application that you never intend on distributing. Cabal? Isn’t that what you do if you’re planning on sticking your package on Hackage? But the Cabal always knows. The Cabal is always there. And you should embrace the Cabal, even if you think you’re too small to care. Here’s why:
Attention Conservation Notice. Unqualified identifiers that are used the most on Hackage.
Perhaps you dread the error message:
Ambiguous occurrence `lookup'
It could refer to either `Prelude.lookup', imported from Prelude
or `Data.Map.lookup', imported from Data.Map
It is the message of the piper that has come to collect his dues for your unhygenic unqualified unrestricted module import style.
Or perhaps your a library writer and trying to think up of a new symbol for your funky infix combinator, but you aren’t sure what other libraries have used already.
Attention Conservation Notice. A listing of how Gang of Four design patterns might be equivalently implemented in Haskell. A phrasebook for object-oriented programmers dealing with functional programming concepts.
In their introduction to seminal work Design Patterns, the Gang of Four say, “The choice of programming language is important because it influences one’s point of view. Our patterns assume Smalltalk/C++-level language features, and that choice determines what can and cannot be implemented easily. If we assumed procedural languages, we might have included design patterns called ‘Inheritance,’ ‘Encapsulation,’ and ‘Polymorphism.’”