Committing side effects

Side effects are said to be the bane of the functional programmer but programmers sometimes get confused about these unchaste, unruly, unaccountable effects. Some, of course, are not side effects at all but the purpose of the computation and the reason to have built so darn many computers in the first place. If computer scientists ruled the pharmacy, there might be no drugs at all with intended effects, no labels, just an array of off-label applications.

So what happens at the end of a wild garbage collection cycle when your colleagues have had prior results pulled down and trashed — though they thought they had retained a reference? What happens if you get to the end of the cycle and you find that you never committed any side effects of your own? Nothing that quite fits the algorithm of a collector run amok? What happens if you‘re able to spend a career without committing a single side effect that helps anybody? Maybe nothing. I’ll let you know.

#include is a more powerful preprocessor directive than #undef. You can change the gender of any connector for a few bucks no matter what it had when it left the factory. That’s just as true in computing as it is in society — and why not? Computing and aspiration are inseparable.

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