Algebraic Effects: Another mistake carried through to perfection?
4 comments
·May 10, 2025agentultra
There’s a certain amount of hubris to say, “I don’t know anything about this and you’re making a mistake.” It’s off putting and kills the whole rant.
I’ve heard opinions from smart people with lots of experience who say algebraic effects are not worth the squeeze. I’ve also heard some say that we should all be pushing the boundaries: they are the future.
So the matter doesn’t seem to be decided. Now isn’t the time for maxims.
gitroom
Every time I read stuff like this it just makes me laugh, I honestly never know who to listen to in these debates.
smitty1e
> sweet careers are made of this, so who am I to disagree? Compile the world; Java Python C. Everybody’s looking for some bug. Some of them want to maintain you. Some of them want to be maintained.
For those missing the reference:
The desire of the HN community to pull a random person's uninformed opinion about a topic that they, justifiably, wrote for their own interests and amusement and then pontificate about how either stupid or amazing it is will never ceise to confuse me.
Effects on their own are a very active area of research and I would laugh behind a PL researchers back if they claimed it was a solved issue. Between Monads, call-by-push-value, and algebraic effects there is really no clear "how do people actually use this" answer.
But that's not the job of a PL researcher anyway, or a random software engineer for that matter. Sorry to say, the software engineer knows next to nothing about "the right way" to design language features that people want to use or enjoy using. If anything this should be an HCI person with a penchant for PL or vice versa.