A roadmap, explaining effects and language design philosophy
This update introduces the EYG roadmap, a blog post to explain effects and a talk discussing predictability and usability of language features.
Writing a roadmap
I have a lot of plans for EYG and up to now they have all lived in my head. Now you can check out what is being worked on on the roadmap.
Top priority is stabilising and documenting things where experimentation is finished. First will be specifying the datastructure under the language and committing to non breaking changes. People have already started building on the EYG Intermediate Representation (EYG IR). Documenting and stabilising will make their lives much easier. The EYG project contains many experiments, some successful (closure serialisation is great), as well as some less successful (signals don't need to be built into the language).
As part of stabilising and documentation efforts I will also clean out the repository and remove some experiments.
If you have any comments or questions you can reply to this email.
Explaining effects
The last newsletter discussed how fragile modern software development was and how EYG improves the situation. Algebraic effects are a key component of reducing fragility.
Effects are simple but abstract which means it can take some time to understand them. I wrote a blog post to explain how I think about effects and how they ensure purity in programs.
There will be follow up posts on how to type effects as well as the topic of effect handlers.
Talking at functional conf 2025
Last month I gave a talk "Eat your Greens - A philosophy for language design."
First is a discussion about how language features can be predictable, useful or hopefully both. Then I dive into specific EYG features; effects, closure serialisation and a statically typed REPL.
That's all for this update, I hope you have enjoyed it.
This issue is available, and shareable, at https://eyg.run/news/editions/4