Introduction to Effect: Writing in TypeScript Without Pain

I’ve written and read a lot of TypeScript: pet projects, open-source, corporate code under NDA. For a long time, one question kept bothering me: can’t we do better? Fortunately, effect systems — an idea from the 80s — are gaining popularity and making their way into mainstream languages.

This talk is about Effect — a library that changes the way we write TypeScript code. We’ll look at the sources of pain in our code, try to solve these problems ourselves, and then see how Effect approaches them. We’ll see what Effect has in common with React and which TypeScript proposals it already provides solutions for today. Along the way, we’ll cover the basics and collect the key ideas behind Effect — ideas that may seem strange at first.

Instead of selling yet another library, I’ll try to clearly present a fresh perspective on building programs beyond the status quo.