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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

I will call reactive paradigms "satisfactory" after I get to see any real framework on it that is easy to read and write large programs on.

Yes, they are very promising. But since every single widely deployed language (and "widely" here includes things like Haskell) is a bad fit to it, we are missing some more development before that promise is fulfilled or failed.

(And by the way, the JS frameworks, popular as they are can not claim to be free from the Von Neumann constraints. That requires a pure language.)

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I agree. For me, when I'm working with something where I can get functionality like Differential Datalog [1] is when I move over to a reactive-ish paradigm. It's half the answer, and there is a lot of state-related stuff in the other half.

There are probably other ways to provide the rest of the pieces, rules engines, some of those DSLs that describe stream graphs with composable nodes, other incremental querying stuff I can't remember right now ...

[1] https://github.com/vmware/differential-datalog

I'm not sure it meets your criteria but R Shiny (https://shiny.rstudio.com/) is purely reactive.

I've always found Arrowized FRP to be really nice to work with.

The abstract concept of arrowized FRP is quite promising.

The practical implementations are either way too complex for everyday usage¹, or specialized into a narrow application. Also, arrows create a completely different sublanguage on any mainstream language that supports it; a sublanguage where things don't compose as nicely.

1 - You can't demand that people will convert a simple procedure into a series of unrelated steps spread all around, that's a receipt for bad code. The fact that people do such things on unrelated domains is not a reason to have it here, it creates bad code there too.

Angular uses RxJS as a primitive. It's a breeze writing reactive components and applications that way.

I have yet to see even a medium size program stay "a breeze" due to choice of this kind. Tons and tons of small parts that give the facade of easy breezy. But then the whole that they make up is left incomprehensible. Would be delighted to see counter evidence.

Netflix uses RxJS for their UI.[0] Not the end all be all but some evidence.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AslncyG8whg

Not entirely sure how I rank this evidence. Pretty sure the UI had gotten less to my liking as the years go by.

Still, definitely counts as evidence. Thanks!

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