[narnarpapadaddy]

I feel the author’s pain. LLMs take over right as we’re finally figuring out the unifying models and algorithms for programming languages.

Some time back I went on a tour of the fort at Dry Tortugas. Largest brick masonry fort in the world. Many innovations of the form. It was abandoned right as it was completed because barrel rifling had just been invented, dramatically increasing the penetrating power of artillery, rendering brick masonry forts obsolete virtually overnight.

This project evokes a similar feeling.

[adastra22]

Make better typed programming languages should improve agentic ergonomics as well as human ergonomics. I’d expect better performance by the agents if they can encode more constraints in the type system like this.

[narnarpapadaddy]

It’s possible.

Effects allow more aspects of computation to be represented/generalized, but as the author has noted concrete implementations have already been tried in some cases. Rust’s ownership, Java’s exceptions, Typescript’s async are all instances where the language made a choice about and provided syntax for some effect.

Generalized effects are not yet proven (IMO) to improve developer ergonomics for rank-and-file devs. It may be the case that most devs need most decisions to be made for them, and the power of effects is just lost to them. That may also apply to agents. They don’t _need_ to encode the constraint. The constraint was decided when the language was picked.