[mpweiher]

> Mathematically, RxJS and Vue/Solid Qwik like FRP are equivalent.

Yes, these are basically the same thing. However, they have little to do with Conal Elliott's "FRP". Which itself is also badly named.

> Meijer (who invented Rx)

Well "invented". What's a bit surprising is that with both Rx and the Rx-style "FRP", there either is no public history of the ideas at all (Rx) or it is patently wrong (Rx-style "FRP"). Or a bit of both.

For example, the "Reactive" part of Rx-style FRP appears to come from the definition of system styles by Harel. Both the connection of synchronous dataflow with the term "Reactive" and with FP languages are made in the paper on Lustre, which is a language that integrates synchronous dataflow into an FP language. But there is nothing inherently FP-ish about synchronous dataflow, it was previously integrated into to the imperative language Esterel, and they also made a variant of C with synchronous dataflow.

Again, nobody mentions this, it is all presented as having been invented out of thin air and the principles of Functional Programming. (Or as having come from Conal Elliott's FRP, which is not true. Ask Conal Elliott).

Once I figured out the connections, I asked Erik Meijer, who has "I am the original inventor of Rx..." in his bio. He admitted that he was "inspired" by synchronous dataflow. And of course that is pretty much all it is. Except they dropped the requirement for it to be synchronous.

What do you get when you drop "synchronous" from "synchronous dataflow"? FRP, obviously ;-)

Just like Objective-C is Smalltalk + C, and Objective-C - C is ... Swift?

Controlling narratives is important.

[inglor]

All this is documented in Meijer's actual paper though? (Your mouse is a database) as well as his aformentioned talk (duality and the end of reactive).

He for sure invented observables (as we know it and as the mathematically dual of enumerables) - that doesn't mean it was the first ever reactive system or the concept of data being dependent of other data.

If I remember correctly he also explicitly talks abut Conal FRP and notations in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOl4E8x3fmw if interested

[mpweiher]

I have seen plenty of Erik's talks and certainly read Your mouse is a database a bunch of times.

What is "documented" there is the alternate history of all this coming out of fundamental insights into FP and dualities and all that.

But that isn't the case, it just sounds a lot better than "I found a really complicated way to map dataflow onto FP concepts".

But we as an industry just love complicated.

[Paradigma11]

I think the important contribution of Meijer and RX is realizing the duality of IEnumerable and IObservable which enabled them to use the same programming constructs. The meat of RX is in all the combinators so you can express complex behaviours very succinctly.

[mpweiher]

Hmm...Smalltalk had the same iteration methods over streams and collections since at least Smalltalk-80, so not sure what the important contribution here is.

(Waiting for the LISPers to chime in...)

[inglor]

An observable is not the same as a Smalltalk stream, directionality wise. Smalltalk streams are like unix streams or a C stream.

[mpweiher]

Whether the flow is push or pull is a fairly irrelevant implementation detail for a dataflow system.

That doesn't mean it can't have big effects, but if you're relying on those, or they do become relevant, you should probably ask yourself whether your system is really dataflow.