tl;dr: Languages offer ways of composing side effects. Delay is just another side effect and "reactive" isn't that special.
Erik Meijer: Duality and the End of Reactive [video]
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Re: Erik Meijer: Duality and the End of Reactive [video]
#12The first six minutes alone are worth a listen if you're in a rabble-rousing mood.
Wow, I listened to the first six minutes on your recommendation and was pretty put off. The speaker mocks his audience of Microsoft engineers (like not in fun, he is really saying their culture sucks). He is dismissive of "reactive programming" as nonsense from architecture astronauts, without giving a remotely fair description of what it actually is. His straw-man of "var x = 10; println(x); x = 42; println(x)" is n…
Erik is a little trollish when expressing his opinions. From what I noticed, he loves flames. People either love his style or hate it. I guess you're in the later group - personally I don't mind when he's mocking something I care about, because from what I observed, he's always joking or half-joking and he'll say the opposite of what he just said in a couple of weeks.
> He is dismissive of "reactive programming" as nonsense from architecture astronauts, without giving a remotely fair description of what it actually is.
That's because his presentation is from React 2014, so he can fairly assume that the audience has some idea of what he's talking about, because "reactive" is the freaking topic of this audience - http://reactconf.com/
> if you're throwing punches you should know what you're talking about
Well, he kind of does. He's one of the architects of Reactive Extensions (Rx) and now he's contributing to RxJava. I don't agree with many of his opinions, for example I think they made design mistakes while architecting Rx, but he's OK in the knowledge department ;-)
> At 17:30 he makes a joke about a Steve Jobs function that says "iPhone", "iPad", "iCloud", and then "terminates naturally". Holy bad taste.
He also makes the same joke about himself - was trying to explain how streams are terminated, either naturally or by error (the joke on himself was that he was fired, i.e. onError).
Re: Erik Meijer: Duality and the End of Reactive [video]
#13Now I want to know who was in the audience (esp. the two 'math' guys off to the right).
At very least, these guys
Re: Erik Meijer: Duality and the End of Reactive [video]
#14(Shameless self-promotion) I just finished by thesis on a new programming language called SolScript, which is reactive and based on "math". It's a hard real-time language for avionics software, BUT it has type inference and duck typing (everything is "symbolic"). SolScript is supposed to look familiar to anyone with a basic knowledge of mathematics. It's also a literate language, because every SolScript file is a Mar…
Just had a little glance (I'm on my way out the door), but if it's possible to construct arbitrarily large lists (as seems to be implied by the availability of e.g. "range N" for any N, how can you guarantee that e.g. "sum large_list" can actually terminate within the time bound set by the frequency? Also there seems to be no actual proof of safety of the language's semantics (are the semantics formally specified?),…
The length of all lists is known at compile-time. So, yes, you can do "sum range hugeNumber", but the compiler will tell you that your program can't be run at the correct frequency. (The possible range of the `hugeNumber` variable is known to the compiler, so it can know the maximum size of the list you are asking.)
The compiler can find out the range of numbers and the lengths of lists using static analysis, because SolScript is such a "restricted" language. Functional programmers would probably dump all that information into a type system. We call it "dataflow analysis", but I think the end result is the same.
Note that, all of the static analysis is done on the dataflow graph underlying a SolScript program. In the dataflow graph there are no "functions" or "classes"... The static analysis is much simpler because it is done on something more primitive than the language itself.
Re: Erik Meijer: Duality and the End of Reactive [video]
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, I listened to the first six minutes on your recommendation and was pretty put off. The speaker mocks his audience of Microsoft engineers (like not in fun, he is really saying their culture sucks). He is dismissive of "reactive programming" as nonsense from architecture astronauts, without giving a remotely fair description of what it actually is. His straw-man of "var x = 10; println(x); x = 42; println(x)" is n…
When you say that he's mocking Microsoft engineers, is that because of the Visual Basic comments? Because Erik actually enjoys VB and was responsible for adding some features to it. He's a former employee, so there's context... And I don't think he's being dismissive of reactive programming, he's dismissive of that definition, which is too broad. He was one of the main proponents of Reactive programming inside Micros…
> When you say that he's mocking Microsoft engineers, is that because of the Visual Basic comments?
"In Redmond, like a lot of people talk about code but don't write it, so I think Microsoft can only come back if, you know, they start writing more code."
> And I don't think he's being dismissive of reactive programming, he's dismissive of that definition, which is too broad.
The definition seems pretty reasonable to me. It immediately resonated with me; it described a principle I had been trying to achieve in some code I was writing recently. The idea of having changes automatically propagate through your model as a data-flow network is a pretty noticeable contrast to other ways of programming.
> He was one of the main proponents of Reactive programming inside Microsoft.
Yeah I guess I don't have this context. But without it, the talk just rubbed me wrong.
Re: Erik Meijer: Duality and the End of Reactive [video]
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, I listened to the first six minutes on your recommendation and was pretty put off. The speaker mocks his audience of Microsoft engineers (like not in fun, he is really saying their culture sucks). He is dismissive of "reactive programming" as nonsense from architecture astronauts, without giving a remotely fair description of what it actually is. His straw-man of "var x = 10; println(x); x = 42; println(x)" is n…
Erik is a little trollish when expressing his opinions. From what I noticed, he loves flames. People either love his style or hate it. I guess you're in the later group - personally I don't mind when he's mocking something I care about, because from what I observed, he's always joking or half-joking and he'll say the opposite of what he just said in a couple of weeks. > He is dismissive of "reactive programming" as n…
> Well, he kind of does.
If he has that much background I would expect him to know better than to give such a poor example when he's trying to make fun of a definition as "dilbert-esque."
Tongue-in-cheek is a fun style and I totally get that, but if you're taking unfair hyperbolic pot-shots I think it should be at your own expense, not other people's. But that's just me.
Re: Erik Meijer: Duality and the End of Reactive [video]
#17Now I want to know who was in the audience (esp. the two 'math' guys off to the right).
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Re: Erik Meijer: Duality and the End of Reactive [video]
#18The first six minutes alone are worth a listen if you're in a rabble-rousing mood.
Wow, I listened to the first six minutes on your recommendation and was pretty put off. The speaker mocks his audience of Microsoft engineers (like not in fun, he is really saying their culture sucks). He is dismissive of "reactive programming" as nonsense from architecture astronauts, without giving a remotely fair description of what it actually is. His straw-man of "var x = 10; println(x); x = 42; println(x)" is n…
> if you're throwing punches you should know what you're talking about.
Ironically, I think you completely missed his point, probably because of an unfamiliarity with his background and history. He's not dismissive of reactive programming at all, quite the opposite! For example, he gave a course on Coursera about Functional Reactive Programming with Martin Odersky and Thomas Kuhn[0].
So my take on it is that he's just making fun of himself and his friends in a typical blunt Dutch fashion. Which of course doesn't work if you don't know the context.
Re: Erik Meijer: Duality and the End of Reactive [video]
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, I listened to the first six minutes on your recommendation and was pretty put off. The speaker mocks his audience of Microsoft engineers (like not in fun, he is really saying their culture sucks). He is dismissive of "reactive programming" as nonsense from architecture astronauts, without giving a remotely fair description of what it actually is. His straw-man of "var x = 10; println(x); x = 42; println(x)" is n…
> if you're throwing punches you should know what you're talking about. Ironically, I think you completely missed his point, probably because of an unfamiliarity with his background and history. He's not dismissive of reactive programming at all, quite the opposite! For example, he gave a course on Coursera about Functional Reactive Programming with Martin Odersky and Thomas Kuhn[0]. So my take on it is that he's jus…
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Re: Erik Meijer: Duality and the End of Reactive [video]
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, I listened to the first six minutes on your recommendation and was pretty put off. The speaker mocks his audience of Microsoft engineers (like not in fun, he is really saying their culture sucks). He is dismissive of "reactive programming" as nonsense from architecture astronauts, without giving a remotely fair description of what it actually is. His straw-man of "var x = 10; println(x); x = 42; println(x)" is n…
> if you're throwing punches you should know what you're talking about. Ironically, I think you completely missed his point, probably because of an unfamiliarity with his background and history. He's not dismissive of reactive programming at all, quite the opposite! For example, he gave a course on Coursera about Functional Reactive Programming with Martin Odersky and Thomas Kuhn[0]. So my take on it is that he's jus…
Cool, I'm totally open to the possibility that I missed the self-deprecating shtick from lack of context. If so, mea culpa.