Port Perl to Haskell

[xcthulhu]

This is a follow up on a conversation we had on slack. There I suggested that the perl scripts in the scripts could be executables written in Haskell.

There are pros and cons to this suggestion:

Cons

• Aeson is more far more annoying than jq for pulling data out of a JSON
• Hackage dependencies can and will break; scripts avoid dependency hell a lot better
• Probably should have CI to make sure the PRs don't break the build
• Haskell is harder to rapid prototype than perl scripts

Pros

• Spacchetti could be published to Hackage, which makes for easier installs with cabal install spacchetti, nix-env -iA nixpkgs.haskellPackages.spacchetti and so on.
• Dhall and psc-package are written in Haskell. Haskell is a natural fit for gluing them together.
• In the long run pure functional code is more maintainable than shell scripts

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I have some spare cycles right now to do the port, but perhaps this is premature. So I'll wait for you to give me the go ahead...

[justinwoo]

Sounds good. I guess only a few of the scripts are actually useful to port (add/prepare/update from bower), then there's some feature improvements I'd like to do in the future (mostly making local overrides setup easy and scriptless).

I only ask that the perl files not be removed since I'll keep using and maintaining them 😄

[xcthulhu]

I only ask that the perl files not be removed since I'll keep using and maintaining them 😄

Sure thing!

[Profpatsch]

fyi I already have some Haskell setup from my experiments.

[Profpatsch]

@xcthulhu You might be interested in #17

[justinwoo]

I guess a lot of the above desired could be implemented in https://github.com/justinwoo/spacchetti-cli

[justinwoo]

Since the Spacchetti CLI largely only does some basic psc-package set generation and does management of projects from Dhall, I think this now does kind of belong here. But I'm not entirely sure who all even wants to work on this, and I have been a happy consumer of my own perl scripts for quite a while now.

[xcthulhu]

Sounds good! I don't have time to work on this right now, so I will close this issue.