typelevel / typelevel/cats-effect

Emphasize programs-as-values in the documentation

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#3,031 3 comments 4 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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:books: docs
Dominant language
Scala
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Description

Following an extensive discord discussion, it seems we can be better at teaching the program-as-values paradigm in the Cats Effect documentation, and that this should be given priority over concurrency concepts (which presumably build on that knowledge anyway).

Personally, it hadn't really struck me until that discussion that without an appreciation for flatMap and friends, it can feel like the only way to get an A out of IO[A] and compose programs is by calling an unsafeRun* method.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No documentation file or test is named. Start by locating the Cats Effect documentation sections covering concurrency and program composition, then review how IO[A], flatMap, and unsafeRun* are introduced. Done means the documentation clearly teaches programs as values before relying on concurrency concepts.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
scala
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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