Lab note #064 Current API and developer affordance with more scheduler work

The work on the scheduler is to support async effect handlers. It won't do at all, if a network request always blocks the evaluation of the computational graph. So I embarked on it about two weeks ago. Right now, the API looks like this (subject to change). There&

Lab note #063 Vibe coding a scheduler

This was a tough past week. I was working on supporting async handlers, even if the reactive part was synchronous. I didn't want the graph to have to wait on network requests. This turned out to be tough. Also I got food poisoning this past week. The design

Types as a design tool

There are some programmer that love types and there are others who eschew them. When reasonable people fall on both sides, it's good reason to look for a latent variable that better explains the underlying motivation or cause. Latent variables, by definition, are hard to measure or observe

Lab note #062 Automagic juice is not quite worth the squeeze

I made good progress on the reactive engine. * Simplified the requirements for define a handler. * Started work on the scheduler * No longer need to handler to ability type checking method, by converting from protocols into abstract base classes. This was one example of where AI lead me astray. I also

When declarative systems break

A couple of months ago, I had to reload everything I knew about reactivity back into my head. I discovered that I missed a large corner of the development around unstructured reactivity, by way of Signals. From arguments about signals vs. functional components on Twitter and in post comments, it

Can you enable multiple resumption by implementing your own call stack?

❓This is a Deep Research report with GPT o3-mini💭<goal> If I wanted to build and design an algebraic effect system in a language that didn't support delimited continuations (like python), but I wanted multi-resumption, I wouldn't be able to use generators. So how

Visual programming is stuck on the form

Underlying great creations that you love—be it music, art, or technology—its form (what it looks like) is driven by an underpinning internal logic (how it works). I noticed this pattern while watching a talk on cellular automaton and realized it's "form follows function" paraphrased

Lab note #060 Writing words and type checking effects

I spent a good part of this week writing and rewriting a blog post, as part of my commitment to publish more this year. I wrote about 10k words, only to keep about 4k of them. Must be the sunk cost fallacy, because it feels bad to delete entire pages

Lab note #059 Effects type checking

With the release of OpenAI's Deep Research and its testimonies on Twitter, I finally slapped down $200/month for Pro subscription. Deep research is what I do all the time by hand anyway, I figured I'd get a lot of mileage out of it. The second

Algebraic Handler Lookup in Koka, Eff, OCaml, and Unison

❓This was a report from GPT3o-mini with Deep Research💭What are the different ways to do handler look up in programming languages that support algebraic effects? I know sometimes, they're also called "abilities" in some languages. A starting point of languages that I know support algebraic

TIL Message handler inside of useEffect

useEffects have a lot of footguns, especially with the dependency list. This is one of them. If I have a web worker that I need to communicate with, I need to have a message handler. The message handler needs to change the state of my frontend application. It's

Lab note #058 Free Monad Effects and Algebraic Effects

I'd finished up looking into reactivity (with the exception of data type enforced reactivity, like differential dataflow), and I pulled out code with pedagogical sample code implementing signals and autotracking. * iamwilhelm/pedago_signals: A pedagogical implementation of hybrid push-pull signals in Python * iamwilhelm/pedago_autotracking: A pedagogical implementation