The fact that I changed a calculation from a constant to reading its value from indexeddb shouldnt need to be an intrusive change. It is makes things more likely to break, there isnt some 'oh you decided to do io so you deserve to do a big refactor' point

Fair enough. It might be a breaking change but wouldn't it be nice if instead of having to rewrite everything into continuation passing style (a boring and error prone process!) you could just do something simple like

    var a = await someBigFunc()

or

    do
      a <- someBigFunc()

Javascript in its current state is not built for supporting CPS programming very well. You often end up needing to reimplement control flow primitives like while loops, break statements and exception handling since those don't play nice with async stuff.

> This is just not something that happens in real life.

You never change code in real life? You don't always know what functions are going to be async up-front. They might become async later, 4 levels down, when someone decides to do some IO. What happens then? Exactly. You have to ripple that code all the way up to the top of the API.

This is definitely something that happens to me a lot in real life.

And there isnt some magical point at which a change becomes large enough that it warrants a refactoring of unrelated code just because of the control flow.

It's happened to me in real life. When you want to go from keeping a value in external storage to keeping it in memory, you've gone from async to sync. The reverse happens too. These are not huge conceptual changes. When they require restructuring an entire program, it's reasonable to wonder why that program's structure is so brittle. "Likely make them async even if you don't know, just in case" sounds to me like an admission of this problem. Why would I want to make an in-memory lookup async, thus forcing it to wait in the event queue and defeating the purpose of RAM? The only reason to do that is that the programming model imposes a large complexity tax for not doing it.

Consider the simple case where one wants to look up a value synchronously if one has it in memory, and go get it from storage asynchronously if one doesn't. That's a natural thing to want, but it's problematic in Node. The problem is not syntactic—you can easily write a function that calls back immediately in the one case and asynchronously in the other. It's that sync and async semantics don't compose well, so when you start to do anything a little complicated (e.g. launch N requests and call back when all N have either returned or failed), the two trip over one another. Working in a Lisp that compiles to JS, I had to write some surprisingly complex macros in order to get correct behaviour. I wouldn't dream of writing that JS code by hand.

Are you serious? This happens in real life all the time.

Not conceptually. From the perspective of the rest of the program, isPrime(x) has no side effect regardless of which method you use to implement it. If you are working in a purely functional language, then it makes sense to have introducing IO be a major change, as it has huge potential to make a function impure, and assuming IO is a pure function is roughly the equivalent of unsafePerformIO. However, in this case, we are not even working in a pure functional language. In concept, there is no reason that implementing a function with IO should require writing code outside of that function differently than implementing it with CPU.