I don't have anything of substance to add, but author, if you're reading this, I enjoyed your writing style a lot.
What Color Is Your Function?
11–20 of 153 posts
Re: What Color Is Your Function?
#12I had no clue this was about async functions. I assumed it was safe/unsafe functions until I got to the part about it not being. I think that is a much stronger issue than sync/async.
I guess more generally, it's about effects. The same rant could apply to any particular effect, because they share the property of being infectious: async, unsafe (in C#, not Rust), throws (checked exceptions), IO, etc.
My question is: In a language that has a first-class effect system, does the red/blue problem disappear? Does being able to generalize over effect allow you to avoid cutting the world in half, and allow you to compose effects easier?
Re: What Color Is Your Function?
#13I had no clue this was about async functions. I assumed it was safe/unsafe functions until I got to the part about it not being. I think that is a much stronger issue than sync/async.
I guess more generally, it's about effects . The same rant could apply to any particular effect, because they share the property of being infectious: async, unsafe (in C#, not Rust), throws (checked exceptions), IO, etc. My question is: In a language that has a first-class effect system, does the red/blue problem disappear? Does being able to generalize over effect allow you to avoid cutting the world in half, and al…
At first, it reminded me about const-correctness in c++.
Re: What Color Is Your Function?
#14No actor-model based language has this problem, so perhaps all it comes down to is baking in the right(or even any decent) concurrency support from the start, at the language level.
Re: What Color Is Your Function?
#15I had no clue this was about async functions. I assumed it was safe/unsafe functions until I got to the part about it not being. I think that is a much stronger issue than sync/async.
I guess more generally, it's about effects . The same rant could apply to any particular effect, because they share the property of being infectious: async, unsafe (in C#, not Rust), throws (checked exceptions), IO, etc. My question is: In a language that has a first-class effect system, does the red/blue problem disappear? Does being able to generalize over effect allow you to avoid cutting the world in half, and al…
Absolutely, yes.
For instance, here is an abstraction of code which reads and writes
class Monad m => MonadTeletype m where
writeLn :: String -> m ()
readLn :: m String
class Monad m => MonadNow m where
now :: m UTCTime
echoTime :: (MonadNow m, MonadTeletype m) => m ()
echoTime = do
line instance MonadTeletype IO where
writeLn = putStrLn
readLn = getLine
instance MonadTeletype IO where
now = getCurrentTime
Re: What Color Is Your Function?
#16We can massively generalize this by calling "blue" "pure" and "red" "impure". The end result is essentially Haskell (but you can take it much further, too!). --- There's something horrifyingly restrictive about having merely (blue -> pure, red -> impure), though. All "blue" functions behave roughly the same (e.g., very, very nicely and compositionally) but "red" functions come in many classes: async, stateful, except…
> We can massively generalize this by calling "blue" "pure" and "red" "impure". The end result is essentially Haskell (but you can take it much further, too!).
Yes, I wish I'd taken the time to work more Haskell into the post but this thing has been marinating on my hard drive for months and I wanted to just get it done before the Superbowl ended and the wife and kids got home.
> (That and sum types, because nobody is served by a bunch of integers named Token.LEFT_BRACKET.)
What said it was an integer? ;)
Re: What Color Is Your Function?
#17I had no clue this was about async functions. I assumed it was safe/unsafe functions until I got to the part about it not being. I think that is a much stronger issue than sync/async.
These kind of distinctions happen all the time . The classic http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html - one colour for html-encoded strings, one colour for plain strings. Functions that might fail with an error or functions that never fail. Logging versus non-logging. Database-accessing or not. Callable from user scripts or not. Keeping track of colour - in a way where correctness is guaranteed by the comput…
I'm not sure if you're leading this or not, but to be clear... this is exactly a type system.
(Edit: read your blog; it's clear you're leading it. Poe's Law is in effect sometimes here, sorry 'bout that!)
Re: What Color Is Your Function?
#18Interesting allegory. Pretty much the exact same thing could be said about pure/impure functions in a language like Haskell -- where I thought this was going (until I realized it was about JS)
Re: What Color Is Your Function?
#19We can massively generalize this by calling "blue" "pure" and "red" "impure". The end result is essentially Haskell (but you can take it much further, too!). --- There's something horrifyingly restrictive about having merely (blue -> pure, red -> impure), though. All "blue" functions behave roughly the same (e.g., very, very nicely and compositionally) but "red" functions come in many classes: async, stateful, except…
> We can massively generalize this by calling "blue" "pure" and "red" "impure". The end result is essentially Haskell (but you can take it much further, too!). Yes, I wish I'd taken the time to work more Haskell into the post but this thing has been marinating on my hard drive for months and I wanted to just get it done before the Superbowl ended and the wife and kids got home. > (That and sum types, because nobody i…
> What said it was an integer? ;)
Ha, well, totally fair. But, as long as this watercooler language is essentially "Javascript++", I'm not going to let it get away ensuring sum types are bolted on :)
Re: What Color Is Your Function?
#20I don't have anything of substance to add, but author, if you're reading this, I enjoyed your writing style a lot.
Thank you! I know the reader's time is precious so I try to cram as much entertainment and information in there as I can.