[Haskell-cafe] Algebraic Effects?

[Viktor Dukhovni]

> On Sep 17, 2018, at 10:57 PM, Vanessa McHale <vanessa.mchale at iohk.io> wrote:
> 
> You can certainly create a new type signature for things that can fail with error or undefined, but keep in mind that the *real* logical bottom, viz. infinite recursion, is still there. I know that Idris and ATS both have some mechanism for checking for non-termination (and in the case of ATS, it is dealt with as an algebraic effect I believe), but GHC would not truly be able to eliminate bottoms without writing an extension yourself.

Given the novelty (to me) of Algebraic Effects, my question was intended
to be broader than just whether they could help expose exception signatures.
Are they likely to play a larger role in Haskell?  Are they sufficiently
simpler to reason about or use than monads to warrant thinking in terms
of Effects instead in some/many cases?

> In the case of the bug you mentioned I'd guess it's just API stability/the
> Haskell ecosystem. I believe error and undefined are in the Haskell2010 report
> so I doubt they're going to stop causing pain anytime soon :)

Yes, of course, but I would still like to see libraries convert exceptions
in underlying dependencies to something that might make sense to the caller
of the library.  Thus, (with no prejudice against the Network.DNS library,
it just happens a core library in my project) I'd have expected the DNS
library to return a some DNS-specific exception (malformed packet, ...)
rather than an error from Attoparsec.  And indeed this has been addressed.

So that was just one possible advantage, but it seems the real win is
supposed to be the ability to construct and compose lots of seemingly
different primitives out of Effects (generators, concurrency, exceptions,
state, ...).

And so I am curious whether Haskell is likely some day to adopt and use
Effects in some essential way, or whether they will remain a feature of
peripheral libraries.

Effects appear to be marketed as simpler to learn/use and to offer greater
modularity than monads and monad transformers.  Do they deliver on these
promises, especially in larger projects?

-- 
	Viktor.