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I'm going to go out on a limb here with a prediction. Reactive Programming will not catch on in any big way. Maybe in 10 years I'll look foolish for having said

I'm going to go out on a limb here with a prediction. Reactive Programming will not catch on in any big way. Maybe in 10 years I'll look foolish for having said this, but I'm willing to take the chance.

seriousluoldmof 9y ago
Back when I was a kid, we called this rapid application development - but then again, we didn't create cults around dev methodologies...
- naasking 9y ago
  > but then again, we didn't create cults around dev methodologies... You sure about that? I certainly recall plenty of holy wars over object oriented programming.
  - mhd 9y ago
    And the 4GL bubble.
- klibertp 9y ago
  > Back when I was a kid, we called this rapid application development What do you mean by "this"? RAD tools like Visual Basic, Delphi or Cincom Smalltalk were event-based - which is also true with most native GUI frameworks, BTW - but they did not provide any abstraction above the level of events. Reactive programming takes events and stuffs them down a set of pipelines, where previously you had this giant switch statement for dispatch and the logic for actually doing something was split among some of the branches of that switch. Now you can group your logic around a certain pipe, which allows you to see a complete description of complex processes at a glance, without the need to guess "which event is used as a next step of this process?" So Reactive is actually a quite convenient interface to event-driven systems and it wasn't available in RAD tools of the nineties (if memory serves, might be wrong on this?)
parmesan 9y ago
It's turned out to become a standard for mobile developers due to the concurrent and async nature of the platform. As a side note, I've been working through ~10 different code bases during the last 4 years - every single one has included an Rx library. Scala, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C++. My bet it's here to stay.
- rhapsodic 9y ago
  >It's turned out to become a standard for mobile developers due to the concurrent and async nature of the platform. A "standard for mobile developers"? Not that I can see.
kitd 9y ago
On the contrary, it ties in neatly with platforms & programming models that can't just rely on being able to summon up an OS thread at will, but have to self-schedule over a small number of owned threads. In just about every event-loop-driven, there exists an implementation of Rx (or something like that anyway)

seriousluoldmof 9y ago

Back when I was a kid, we called this rapid application development - but then again, we didn't create cults around dev methodologies...

naasking 9y ago
> but then again, we didn't create cults around dev methodologies... You sure about that? I certainly recall plenty of holy wars over object oriented programming.
- mhd 9y ago
  And the 4GL bubble.
klibertp 9y ago
> Back when I was a kid, we called this rapid application development What do you mean by "this"? RAD tools like Visual Basic, Delphi or Cincom Smalltalk were event-based - which is also true with most native GUI frameworks, BTW - but they did not provide any abstraction above the level of events. Reactive programming takes events and stuffs them down a set of pipelines, where previously you had this giant switch statement for dispatch and the logic for actually doing something was split among some of the branches of that switch. Now you can group your logic around a certain pipe, which allows you to see a complete description of complex processes at a glance, without the need to guess "which event is used as a next step of this process?" So Reactive is actually a quite convenient interface to event-driven systems and it wasn't available in RAD tools of the nineties (if memory serves, might be wrong on this?)

parmesan 9y ago

It's turned out to become a standard for mobile developers due to the concurrent and async nature of the platform. As a side note, I've been working through ~10 different code bases during the last 4 years - every single one has included an Rx library. Scala, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C++. My bet it's here to stay.

rhapsodic 9y ago
>It's turned out to become a standard for mobile developers due to the concurrent and async nature of the platform. A "standard for mobile developers"? Not that I can see.

kitd 9y ago

On the contrary, it ties in neatly with platforms & programming models that can't just rely on being able to summon up an OS thread at will, but have to self-schedule over a small number of owned threads. In just about every event-loop-driven, there exists an implementation of Rx (or something like that anyway)