GoKawiilHave you heard about algebraic effects?
My first attempts to figure out what they are or why I should care about them were unsuccessful. I found a few pdfs but they only confused me more. (There’s something about academic pdfs that makes me sleepy.)
But my colleague Sebastian kept referring to them as a mental model for some things we do inside of React. (Sebastian works on the React team and came up with quite a few ideas, including Hooks and Suspense.) At some point, it became a running joke on the React team, with many of our conversations ending with:
It turned out that algebraic effects are a cool concept and not as scary as I thought from those pdfs. If you’re just using React, you don’t need to know anything about them — but if you’re feeling curious, like I was, read on.
(Disclaimer: I’m not a programming language researcher, and might have messed something up in my explanation. I am not an authority on this topic so let me know!)
Algebraic Effects are a research programming language feature. This means that unlike if , functions, or even async / await , you probably can’t really use them in production yet. They are only supported by a few languages that were created specifically to explore that idea. There is progress on productionizing them in OCaml which is… still ongoing. In other words, Can’t Touch This.
Edit: a few people mentioned that LISP languages do offer something similar, so you can use it in production if you write LISP.
Imagine that you’re writing code with goto , and somebody shows you if and for statements. Or maybe you’re deep in the callback hell, and somebody shows you async / await . Pretty cool, huh?
If you’re the kind of person who likes to learn about programming ideas several years before they hit the mainstream, it might be a good time to get curious about algebraic effects. Don’t feel like you have to though. It is a bit like thinking about async / await in 1999.
The name might be a bit intimidating but the idea is simple. If you’re familiar with try / catch blocks, you’ll figure out algebraic effects very fast.
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