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I don't know, as far as I can tell the demo on the homepage is bugged? Or maybe I misunderstand how it's supposed to work? If I click reset after 2 seconds and then click add 1 right after it, the reset never fires. What's up with that, that's not what I expected to happen?
Yeah, I can see how some scenarios might want that behavior, but it sort of defeats the purpose of the demo. It wouldn't hurt to have the reset be cancelable too if you wanted to really showcase how it should work
The project seems super interesting and I've been following since the creator went on an effect podcast I listened to. My only gripe/concern is the fact that the docs are so glaringly AI (likely claude) generated which is something I've come to not expect from technical documentation writing specifically. All in all though, the verbosity tradeoff for explicit design choice here is the right one and I think it does better than elm by remaining in javascript land rather than building a nicer abstraction layer on top that often needs to reach in to do interesting things with the web apis.
Ran into this exact tradeoff building on Effect too. AI-assisted docs with real review beats a wiki page that says "TODO" for six months. The Schema/Effect combo error messages alone are worth digging past the prose style.
I love both effect and elm, but I cannot swallow yet another Vue/React crap even if it adds effect niceties.
Especially after having used ruby and elixir extensively after years of react/Vue, it feels so backwards (and LLM unfriendly) to split front and backend unless you have gargantuan reactivity needs (you don't).
I wish JS offered just one proper server side focused frontend solution.
Given their heads, most clients / product owners drift toward not just major reactivity but real-time. A lot of us work for others, under barrages of feature requests, and Effect and other tools (which may seem like overkill) can reveal themselves as a very practical lifeline.
"Elixir" not Ruby has real-time built in (Phoenix LiveView), but point stands either way. Ruby's Hotwire does similar server-driven UI too—no need to split front/back unless you truly need heavy client state.
I use it from years, it's the only sane way to write typescript.
The learning curve is steep tho.
In any case it's a hard technology to sell, you don't appreciate it from hello worlds. In fact you hate it for trivial programs.
It shows it's benefits at scale.
Lots of tools like T3 and opencode use it at their core because they solve non trivial problems made of queues, retries, dependency injection, schemas, etc.
It took me 3 months to go from “I will never use it” to “I will never not use it”. Plus it’s always fun to watch the creators of Effect get confused about which brackets to where. The syntax is archaic, luckily we don’t write syntax by hand any more.
Just wondering how a matching backend framework for correctness would look like. Ideally something that doesn't repeat the React mess with two routers but fits right in Inertia style.
Maybe a bit late to ask but how would an EffectTS backend integrate seamlessly? Im looking for a full stack agent driven workflow including domain modeling, designing state machines (with Xstate or SCXML?) etc.
As agentic coding matures, this kind of project is the right direction. The mechanics of writing the code become less important. But having a language framework that naturally resists mistakes will become increasingly useful and important.
Similar to how Rust is obviously a better choice today than C++. Who cares if the language is “more difficult” to code in, if the agents are doing the coding. What we need is building blocks that make it harder to author bugs.
I was thinking about agentic coding as well and a few years ago I probably would have really been interested in this project. But now it sits at a lower abstraction where I care less since the agent is the one managing it. It's strange
That's an interesting - and maybe correct - point. Looking at the examples, it seems very long winded and not something I would want to write myself - but maybe I don't need to care about that anymore, as you say!
This time around in the pre-covid days, F# had a surge of popularity, there was Fable and Giraffe and an elm-style set of frontends (the generic pattern is called MVU - Model View Update), it didn't take off because A) we are still a trend/fad-driven industry and B) there was no AI to help hold your hand in refactoring all of your apps.
These days? Doing this FE SPA framework for Effect/typescript familiarity or Fable for F# familiarity and a model-view update pattern can help one do CQRS better, force you to think about stronger Hexagonal Architecture patterns, and overall help your application care about long term correctness more without you having to hand code every discriminated union as such.
The LLM can't replace you, but it can be an enzyme that lowers the activation energy required to switch from bad old MVC mutable tag soup to MVU frontends with strong data interface designs held in sqlite-dbs-per-aggregate (if you are of a DDD or event sourcing taste, which this pattern does not require!)
Yeah I felt the same at first with Elm proper, but honestly the verbosity mostly disappears once you've got a few components down and start copy-pasting the pattern. The payoff is you basically can't forget a state transition, which was my actual bug source before.
Is it just me? But every time I use a paradigm of global immutable state, almost always I run into edge cases where practically it falls apart either semantically (mental model explosion) or creates performance issues, whether they stem from architectural problems with the framework itself, or just the way computers operate.
Elm's success leaned heavily on the small surface area and strict compiler messages, not just the architecture. Curious whether Effect's error model, which is far more expressive, ends up reintroducing the complexity Elm was explicitly designed to avoid.
