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by bheadmaster 1132 days ago
What's the difference between reactive and functional programming? Both seem to focus on expressing relationships between objects and having compiler/runtime infer the computation, instead of explicitly specifying the computation.
3 comments
dgb23 1132 days ago
> Both seem to focus on expressing relationships between objects and having compiler/runtime infer the computation, instead of explicitly specifying the computation.

That's true of every declarative approach. Functional, reactive, relational, regex etc. are all to some degree declarative.

To answer your question: Functional programming is really more about avoiding mutation at the language surface, while reactive programming is about how mutation propagates through code, so it's an abstraction over specific mutation. This is why they pair nicely together.

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ReleaseCandidat 1132 days ago
Most of the time the term used is "Functional Reactive Programming". If that answers your question.

Although there exists a paper about "Reactive Imperative Programming" (with Dataflow Constraints): https://typeset.io/pdf/reactive-imperative-programming-with-...

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ed_blackburn 1132 days ago
Perhaps if you framed your question subtly differently and asked yourself what is the difference between Erlang and OTP, the answer maybe easier to discern?
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bheadmaster 1132 days ago
What's the exact difference between Erlang and OTP that would answer my question?
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ed_blackburn 1132 days ago
OTP is the means by which the programming language is able to accomplish tasks such as process to process comms, how to supervise actors etc. It's the enabler for the distributed computing compared to Erlang which is the programming language. They're (obviously) complementary but OTP is the magic that enable one to deliver on the reactive manifesto. Functional programming needs augmenting with mechanisms that provide the distributed computing features, it's not enough on its own.
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bheadmaster 1132 days ago
Thanks for the explanation.

Where does reactive programming fit in that concept? Is OTP a "reactive" library? If so, why - what exactly makes it "reactive"?

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