I always saw algebraic effects as a more-ergonomic alternative to functor/applicative/monad for managing I/O and otherwise impure code. If you aren't particularly concerned with that level of purity then yeah it's "just" an indirect way to write an interface.

I've found that in practice, people use effects systems as dynamic-extent globals, like DEFVAR-ed variables in Lisp.

"Oh, it's not a global. Globals are bad. Effects are typed and blend into the function signature. Totally different and non-bad."

No. Typing the effects doesn't help: oh, sure, in Koka I can say that my function's type signature includes the "database connection" effect. Okay, that's a type. Where does the value backing that type come from? Thin air? No, the value backing an effect comes from the innermost handler, the identity of which, in a large program, is going to be hard to figure out.

Like all global variables, the sorts of "effects" currently in vogue will lead to sadness at scale. Globals don't stop being bad when we call them something else: they're still bits of ambient authority that frustrate local reasoning. It's as if everyone started smoking again but called cigarettes "mist popsicles" and claimed that they didn't cause cancer.

There's no way around writing down names for the capabilities we give a program and propagating these names from one part of the program to another. Every scheme to somehow free us from this chore is just smuggling in ambient authority by another name. Ambient authority is seductive. At small scales, it's fine. Better than fine! Beautiful. Then, one day, as your program scales and its maintainership churns, you find you have no idea who implements what.

Software engineering develops antibodies against these seductions. The problem is that the antibodies are name-based, so when we dress up old, bad ideas with new names, we have to re-learn why they're bad.

P.S. You might object, "You're talking about dynamic-extent effects. What about lexically-scoped effects systems?", you might ask. "These fix the problems with dynamic-extent effects."

Sure. Lexical effects are better. That's why every decent language already has a "lexically-scoped effect system". It's called let-over-lambda, or if you squint, an "object". We've come full circle.

How many 4-function calculators have n-key rollover? What would that even be used for? Are you touch typing on the calculator at 100 digits per minute?

I feel like the parent comment was sarcasm

100 digits per minute is less than two per second, I feel like most people exceed that.

This is one of those bizarre "how did you even get that idea" mistakes that ironically replacing developers with AI slop farmers might actually improve on. If you ask Claude to set up a project with NPM and CI, it's not going to do weird shit like that.

I asked Claude to set up a new NPM project and it configured the install task as “npm ci || npm install”, which is stupid. That was on Opus4.7 xhigh. When I pointed out that doing so defeats the purpose, it said “oh yeah of course.”

Turns out there is no equivalent to “npm ci” that doesn’t clear node_modules first, and you can’t call npm install to simulate NPM ci behavior (sans clean).

When I was in school, professors attitudes around attendance was usually "you're only hurting yourself, I don't care if you show up or not".

It's been long enough that I can't claim to be in touch with the current generation of teaching faculty. But it might be an element of that, combined with the desire to provide accessibility for the handful of students who do in fact need the accommodation.

As someone else in the thread pointed out: Canvas is in fact open source, or at least source available on Github. And it's used all over the world, not just in the USA.

It will and nobody at Google will care because they don't make money by caring about each individual user.

> I hope that we can skip the step of having Google as the feudal lord who saves us from anarchy though.

It's clear IMO that this is the plan.

The Google/Meta/Cloudflare axis on the Web is just part of it. Everyone with a nontrivial stake in a major corporation wants techno-feudalism. Every industry is heavily consolidated and is trying to consolidate even more. Lord-and-serf type of arrangements are so prevalent throughout history because they're maximally profitable for the lord and hard to break out of for the serfs.

I've heard of this working in other kinds of markets, where if you can identify the traders who consistently beat the market, and you can emulate them with precise timing, then you can beat the market too.

Oh please. It wasn't even that snarky. It's also still a valid and correct (as far as anyone can tell) answer to the question.

Does it hurt Google if that happens? No, not really, unless it happens a lot and one of the victims happens to be a US senator or something. The value of the control this gives them, if adopted widely, is immeasurable, not to mention the ad-targeting value of identifying more people across devices.