Crosscut

Right now, I'm looking at two options, each of which could be used both for error handling and for tracking side effects: One are monads, the other one algebraic effects.

I've been talking about innovation tokens recently. I only have so much bandwidth, and too much innovation could also harm adoption. But I actually think that in this case, both options are a somewhat safe bet. While algebraic effects are much newer, they seem pretty established by now, in languages like Koka, Unison, and OCaml.

And at this point, I definitely prefer algebraic effects. They enable a much more lightweight syntax that is also familiar to those that are not used to functional programming. And they are more powerful, enabling features like async/await without dedicated language support.