miniblog.

I like the notion of "pac-man complete", the idea that your programming language needs enough effects/IO to do a 2D game: https://prog21.dadgum.com/23.html We should have more levels of language capability. 'Can do Hello World' and 'can do fizzbuzz' are useful for a new language.

Rust is exploring ideas that allow it to generalise over effects, so you don't need foo and foo_async. It's an unusual name, and potentially complicates error messages, but it's good problem to examine.

It's weird how ! denotes side effects when it's allowed in names (Scheme, Ruby) but there isn't a clear equivalent in other languages. My only theory is that "side effects" is often vague. list-add!, table-drop! and ping! are very different effects.