Strange Loop Conference
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2014–2026
40:55 · 69K views · Sep 21, 2014
Evan Czaplicki's Strange Loop 2014 talk surveys the many formulations of functional reactive programming and how they relate historically and theoretically. It then shows how Elm's variant enables hot-swapping and its time-traveling debugger.
HN people point to it as the clearest explanation of what FRP actually means and how its flavors differ.
11 comments from Hacker News
There's an important issue with async iterables: what's the initial value of derived "signals"? In the Dart/Flutter world, async iterables are known as streams. The biggest problem is that they are asynchronous so if you derive new streams from existing streams, you won't have a value immediately for those streams available, you'll have to wait a frame for values to propagate. That's not a problem if you're just processing data, but if you're using them in a UI framework and your UI framework is coupled to the event loop, then you have a problem. This doesn't happen with the ReactiveX approach because things are evaluated immediately, one doesn't have to wait for the event loop to tick. (A fun historical artifact is that ReactiveX has not caught on in the Dart/Flutter community around 2019-ish because it was eventually migrated to use Streams and the initial-value-problem was a real problem that made the benefits of ReactiveX not carry its weight nobody noticed that but I was heavily involved and I am still using a custom framework derived from my observations back then). If we zoom out a bit, the problem is actually that we are trying to define a computation graph and then need a strategy for evaluation it. I think Elm has actually made the biggest progress on that front (here's THE talk on that topic that shows how complicated working out all the kinks can be: this video ) I still think that functional reactive programming solves most of the problems we have in UI-land, but th
If you're interested in Elm but don't really know what it's about, I highly recommend Evan's Strange Loop talk, "Controlling Time and Space: understanding the many formulations of FRP." It will help to already have a bit of background in functional programming. this video
It's been around in various forms, and implemented on top of various languages, for quite some time. The earliest full-fledged FRP implementation for JavaScript was Flapjax – work on it dates all the way back to 2006! [LINK] The paper Flapjax: A Programming Language for Ajax Applications is worth reading. [LINK] The principal designer and maintainer of the Elm Language (a functional reactive lang that compiles to JS) did his Master's Thesis on FRP, and that's a great resource if you want the big picture: [LINK] See also Controlling Time and Space: understanding the many formulations of FRP , by the same author: this video
For those just getting started in FRP or whom may have not seen the presentations at StangeLoop: - this video - Controlling Time and Space: understanding the many formulations of FRP by Evan Czaplicki (Elm language designer/Prezi) - [LINK] - FRP In Practice: Taking a look at Reactive[UI/Cocoa] by Paul Betts (Slack/GitHub) - [LINK] - ReactiveUI - It's pretty neat by Brendan Forster (GitHub)
> "FRP is programming with asynchronous data streams." Maybe, if you drop the F. For clarification on FRP there was a great talk at strangeloop this year: this video