[lewisl9029]

Innovation always leads to change. The fact that framework complexity has been increasing is only incidental.

In fact, I think we're starting to see a trend in the other direction. Angular 1 was a massive mess of complexity, but Angular 2, React-based frameworks, and various other frameworks coming out these days tend to be much simpler.

Believe it or not, the web has been the platform where most of the innovation in UI development paradigms has been taking place in the past few years. And I don't just mean in terms of the sheer number of new things coming out.

The web community pioneered UI development paradigms involving functional programming techniques and immutable data, and have brought its benefits to other platforms (through React Native). I personally would never want to go back to the old way of building UIs. And I suspect I'll feel the same way about client-centric data fetching when I get to try out Relay/GraphQL, Falcor, Om Next, etc in production.

If constant change is the price we have to pay for innovation at such a relentless pace, I personally welcome it with open arms.

[ghuntley]

    > The web community pioneered UI development paradigms involving
    > functional programming techniques and immutable data

Ugh, No. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-l... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agu6jipKfYw

[lewisl9029]

I'm honestly not aware of any UI development platform that makes heavy use of functional techniques and immutable data outside of the web. Sure, papers have been written about the idea, but where else has it been used in practice?

RE: the video. I'm almost certain you know this, but Elm is a part of the web community.

[ghuntley]

Notable examples on the desktop: GitHub for Mac (ReactiveCocca) and GitHub for Windows (ReactiveUI)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XNATGjqM6U and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPyKHxy7X0w and http://web.archive.org/web/20120714082000/http://www.reactiv...

(True Elm is part of the web-community, just saying React was not the first mover but I agree it will certainly be most likely the one that makes FRP cross the chasm)

[goldenkey]

I appreciate your resources, namely the video by the creator of Elm, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agu6jipKfYw.

However, I agree with above poster. I remember developing my first windows app by doing a main event loop. It's been that way for a long time. Only recently are we doing more asychronous callback / bound type mechanisms of reaction. And still not as strong as the FLP stuff mentioned in the video. Not as much functional stuff, just functional paradigms.

I personally really like the perfection of static input/output transformation graphs. But yeah..it's not been that way for a while and I agree with OP, the web being so event/input/signal based, has spurred the movement for better ways of reactive programming.