Have 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.…