Side Effects
Side effects refer to any observable change in a program's state or behavior that occurs outside the scope of a function's return value, such as modifying a global variable, performing I/O operations, or updating a database. In functional programming, side effects are often minimized or isolated to promote predictability, testability, and maintainability in code. This concept is crucial for understanding state management, concurrency, and functional purity in software development.
Developers should learn about side effects to write more reliable and debuggable code, especially in systems where state consistency and concurrency are critical, such as web applications, distributed systems, or real-time data processing. Understanding side effects helps in adopting functional programming principles, reducing bugs related to mutable state, and improving code modularity by separating pure functions from impure operations.