3 ms·

I agree that's a wonderful paper to read, but has it had significant influence in the mainstream?

davedx 9y ago
Maybe not in the mainstream, but I do see echos of the philosophy of reducing accidental complexity in clojure, elm, react/redux, rust.
anandabits 9y ago
Not yet, but I suspect that is partly the mainstream not catching up to the ideas it contains yet.
- chubot 9y ago
  See my sibling comment -- I honestly believe it's describing what people already do. I'm curious what someone who's read the paper (like I have) thinks.
chubot 9y ago
I read this more than 5 years ago, I think from a recommendation on HN. But I must have gotten something different out of it than most people. It is advocating a particular architecture. But that architecture is essentially LAMP, as far as I can tell. It's what we ALREADY do!!! From the paper: FRP is currently a purely hypothetical approach to system architecture that has not in any way been proven in practice. It is however based firmly on principles from other areas (the relational model, functional and logic programming) which have been widely proven. In FRP all essential state takes the form of relations, and the essential logic is expressed using relational algebra extended with (pure) user- defined [18] functions. [18] By user-defined we mean specific to this particular FRP system (as opposed to pre- provided by an underlying infrastructure) ----- - All essential state takes the form of relations This is a database. (SQL deviates from the relational model, but I don't view that as important here. An SQL database stores everything as relations.) - Logic is expressed using pure user-defined functions This is PHP / CGI / FastCGI. PHP is imperative, but the entire program is a pure function, because the request state is cleared between every request. What am I missing? I'm being totally serious -- this is what I got out of it when I read it 5 years ago. You can quibble with the details of PHP or Rails not being pure functions, but I believe what's important is the architecture, not how the source code looks. The essential state is in the database, in the form of relation. Accidental state is thrown away. TL;DR -- PHP/MySQL is functional and relational.
- DenisM 9y ago
  FRP is a constrained environment, which makes it easier to reason about. PHP is comparatively unconstrained, so when reading code you can’t make as many shortcut assumptions. Of course you could write in PHP in accordance to the rules, but subsequent maintainers, including the future you, cannot trust this self-imposed discipline. In other words, you wouldn’t argue that assembler is just fine because through vigor and discipline you can build PHP-like application. Similarly, PHP is not well-suited to stand in for FRP.
  - chubot 9y ago
    I probably shouldn't have said PHP, since people have reactions to that language that may confuse the issue. I should have said stateless Python front ends. Not even CGI/FastCGI, but just plain HTTP front ends. Many large websites use this architecture (YouTube, Instagram, etc.) An example of something that doesn't follow the architecture is a stateful node.js or Go server. I would say that the typical web architecture is similar to what they are talking about, with the benefit of existence :) But you're right in the sense that they are trying to be more strict, starting on page 50: - benefits for state -- avoid useless accidental state. This is the same philosophy behind SQL. - benefits for control -- They are being more strict here, but I think it is missing a lot, because sometimes you need control flow. - benefits for code volume -- I would need to see a real system to evaluate this claim. It's not fair to compare systems that exist with ones that don't :) - benefits for data abstraction -- SQL agrees here. You don't abstract data. People sometimes make this mistake in their OOP languages, but's incidental.
    - DenisM 9y ago
      I see what you mean. I was thinking of smaller granularity, less than an entire HTTP request. You have a good point.
- monocasa 9y ago
  FRP is like excel or well constructed makefiles in that the runtime understands the data flow. Then on updates to any data, you walk through the dataflow graph, running pure functions to update each node.

Maybe not in the mainstream, but I do see echos of the philosophy of reducing accidental complexity in clojure, elm, react/redux, rust.

anandabits 9y ago

Not yet, but I suspect that is partly the mainstream not catching up to the ideas it contains yet.

chubot 9y ago
See my sibling comment -- I honestly believe it's describing what people already do. I'm curious what someone who's read the paper (like I have) thinks.

chubot 9y ago

I read this more than 5 years ago, I think from a recommendation on HN. But I must have gotten something different out of it than most people. It is advocating a particular architecture. But that architecture is essentially LAMP, as far as I can tell. It's what we ALREADY do!!! From the paper: FRP is currently a purely hypothetical approach to system architecture that has not in any way been proven in practice. It is however based firmly on principles from other areas (the relational model, functional and logic programming) which have been widely proven. In FRP all essential state takes the form of relations, and the essential logic is expressed using relational algebra extended with (pure) user- defined [18] functions. [18] By user-defined we mean specific to this particular FRP system (as opposed to pre- provided by an underlying infrastructure) ----- - All essential state takes the form of relations This is a database. (SQL deviates from the relational model, but I don't view that as important here. An SQL database stores everything as relations.) - Logic is expressed using pure user-defined functions This is PHP / CGI / FastCGI. PHP is imperative, but the entire program is a pure function, because the request state is cleared between every request. What am I missing? I'm being totally serious -- this is what I got out of it when I read it 5 years ago. You can quibble with the details of PHP or Rails not being pure functions, but I believe what's important is the architecture, not how the source code looks. The essential state is in the database, in the form of relation. Accidental state is thrown away. TL;DR -- PHP/MySQL is functional and relational.

DenisM 9y ago
FRP is a constrained environment, which makes it easier to reason about. PHP is comparatively unconstrained, so when reading code you can’t make as many shortcut assumptions. Of course you could write in PHP in accordance to the rules, but subsequent maintainers, including the future you, cannot trust this self-imposed discipline. In other words, you wouldn’t argue that assembler is just fine because through vigor and discipline you can build PHP-like application. Similarly, PHP is not well-suited to stand in for FRP.
- chubot 9y ago
  I probably shouldn't have said PHP, since people have reactions to that language that may confuse the issue. I should have said stateless Python front ends. Not even CGI/FastCGI, but just plain HTTP front ends. Many large websites use this architecture (YouTube, Instagram, etc.) An example of something that doesn't follow the architecture is a stateful node.js or Go server. I would say that the typical web architecture is similar to what they are talking about, with the benefit of existence :) But you're right in the sense that they are trying to be more strict, starting on page 50: - benefits for state -- avoid useless accidental state. This is the same philosophy behind SQL. - benefits for control -- They are being more strict here, but I think it is missing a lot, because sometimes you need control flow. - benefits for code volume -- I would need to see a real system to evaluate this claim. It's not fair to compare systems that exist with ones that don't :) - benefits for data abstraction -- SQL agrees here. You don't abstract data. People sometimes make this mistake in their OOP languages, but's incidental.
  - DenisM 9y ago
    I see what you mean. I was thinking of smaller granularity, less than an entire HTTP request. You have a good point.
monocasa 9y ago
FRP is like excel or well constructed makefiles in that the runtime understands the data flow. Then on updates to any data, you walk through the dataflow graph, running pure functions to update each node.