Side Effect

This revision is from 2024/10/30 13:37. You can Restore it.

Reading or writing in a stream makes a mark move along to show where the most recent read or write occurred. (That’s a side effect!) Writing to a screen leaves an irreparable mark on it—a long lasting side effect—and writing to paper is even more indelible—yet another long term side effect. Requiring a user to type on a keyboard is likewise irreversible. In short, side effects are unfortunately omnipresent in computing… Of course, it is possible to imagine living in an ideal world with no side effects, but we would suffer from a kind of computer-autism there since we would not be able to communicate the results of computations — Christian Queinnec, Lisp in Small Pieces
hahaha - I read the above on the toilet this morning (experiencing some very sub-ideal side effects of certain decisions made last night)
Somehow, “side effects” in the positive sense of “making a difference in the world” became conflated with the negative sense of “all this global state and stuff that has made my program a flying spaghetti monster”.
So, to distinguish between these two senses, I propose the term “entanglement” for the negative sense, and that we keep the term “side effects” for the positive sense, the sense meaning “why we bother to write programs at all”, because that’s programmer humor at its finest.