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Comment by pkal | Hacker News Reader

From the historical sources I could find online, it appears that Rust's borrow system was independently invented, or at least they don't mention linear logic or anything substructural. This is kind of interesting to me, especially given the reactions in this thread, and ties into the general difficulty of PL research to find acceptance among practitioners, especially when presented by researchers (which I think is regretful, I like the ideas in the article!). Perhaps we really should stick to terminology like "function colors" to make effect systems more popular (or not, because the color framing makes it sound bad to have different colors in a program, IIRC).

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It's the jargon, I think. PL research is in an awkward position, where the jargon is not shared with the much wider community of people using programming languages daily. From the other side, it looks like there is a small body of theoreticians using impenetrable language for discussing topics I'm supposed to be familiar with, because they are a core part of my day job. It's much easier to accept jargon, when it's used in a clearly separate field.

Some of the terminology is just unfortunate. For example, I have an intuitive understanding of what a type means. The meaning used in PL theory is somehow wider, but I don't really understand how.

And then there is my pet peeve: side effect. Those should be effects instead, because they largely define the observable behavior of the program. Computation, on the other hand, is a side effect, to the extent it doesn't affect the observable behavior.

But then PL theory is using "effect" for something completely different. I don't know what exactly, but clearly not something I would consider an effect.

Man who uses arithmetic upset at research mathematicians for using words like R-module when they clearly do not mean a module in C++

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I don't remember where I read it, but I think Rust cited Cyclone as an influence, a variation of C with "region-based" memory management - more or less the literature name for "lifetimes". I think Rust may be the first to use it directly for stack variables, however.

Rust's discussion boards has an idea of "keyword generics" for expressing some of these concepts. The idea is that a function can be generic over const, async or some other keyworded effect. I like this description. It shows the benefits without too much theory.

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