The structure of this article makes it unreadable if you don’t already know what effects mean in this context. The introduction promises that the talk will exp

The structure of this article makes it unreadable if you don’t already know what effects mean in this context. The introduction promises that the talk will explain what effects are. Finally, some 75% in, after discussing topics like “what happens when we can’t be generic over effects”, it does get around to answering the question of what effects actually are. But the answer is rather unsatisfying if you don’t know these definitions already. For example: “A lot of languages which have effects provide both effect types and effect handlers. These can be used together, but they are in fact distinct features. In this talk we'll only be discussing effect types.” This doesn’t really clarify much.