Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhickey | Hacker News Reader

Why use Elm versus Flapjax?

(Not a criticism -- sing your own praises!)

Flapjax still has you deal with the abstractions provided by HTML and CSS. I generally think these abstractions are pretty problematic, but more subtly, this means you must think imperatively (e.g. modifying the DOM) which doesn't really fit with the FRP paradigm. Flapjax is also based on the classical formulation of FRP which I think is not ideal for this setting (that is a big part of my thesis).

Nonetheless, I think Flapjax is a really cool project, and if you have to work with HTML, CSS, and JS directly, I can imagine it makes many things much more pleasant.

What specifically is your thesis? (I'm well-versed with the various formulations of FRP that have existed over the years.)

P.S. the navigation links at the top of the page don't work in Opera. Why aren't they just links + :hover CSS? (I presume they're written using Elm but that's not good if people for whom Elm doesn't work want to find out more.)

That's a much tougher question. I am still early in the process, so I don't have a clean and clear answer yet. I am trying to approach FRP from the perspective of GUI design. In this context continuous Behaviors and discrete Events are not exactly what a developer would want to deal with. I don't want to go into it too much now, but I will definitely post my thesis once it is done.

Also, thanks for pointing out the Opera mistake. It is on my to-do list!

I wrote a GUI system using FRP in OCaml. I found events + behaviors (and their Cartesian product) to work very well (with the notable exception that syntactic sugar for defining state machines would be a desirable addition), so I'm very curious to see what improvements you suggest.

By "post my thesis" presumably you mean on your website and not HN? (I'll never find it if it's just on HN.)

Who's your thesis advisor?

What was your project called? I remember reading a paper on an ML implementation of FRP (Reactive ML?); I'm curious if that was you. Also, yes, on my website.

I'm working with Stephen Chong. This isn't his primary research focus, but he is a really great adviser. Our PL group is really strong (I think :P), so I have lots of great resources around.

OCamlRT: http://fstutoring.com/~chris/programs/ocamlrt2_20100811.tgz No papers on it sadly, but it's fairly complete. I haven't touched it in a long long time though, other things having since demanded my attention.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com