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Side Effects, Front and Center!: One System’s Side Effect is Another’s Meat and Potatoes.

Published:01 April 2017Publication History
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Abstract

We think of computation in terms of its consequences. The big MapReduce job returns a large result. Web interactions display information. Enterprise applications update the database and return an answer. These are the reasons we do our work. What we rarely discuss are the side effects of doing the work we intend. Side effects may be unwanted, or they may actually cause desired behavior at different layers of the system. This column points out some fun patterns to keep in mind as we build and use our systems.

References

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  • Published in

    cover image Queue
    Queue  Volume 15, Issue 2
    Side Effects
    March-April 2017
    106 pages
    ISSN:1542-7730
    EISSN:1542-7749
    DOI:10.1145/3084693
    Issue’s Table of Contents

    Copyright © 2017 ACM

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    • Published: 1 April 2017

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