[throwaway46281]

Huh? It's called observable because it can be observed (that's what "-able" means). If it were actually meant to observe something (as you say), it would have been named "observer." But it's not - it's the callback that's the observer.

Also observables are more like streams than arrays.

[no_wizard]

I don't think I'm entirely out of band to say there could be a better way of naming them, like why not call them SubscribableStream.

Saying its an observable invokes a messy gray area in people's brains. I know this because I've had to explain observables to co-workers more times than I can count in my career (I'm a big fan of RxJS, I didn't mean what I said as a dismissal), and I like them for async work vs promises in many many cases, but the nomenclature does not invoke easy understanding

[troupo]

Because RxJS made at least one huge mistake: it made its observables lazy.

When does it start? How do you deal with oversubscription? Late starts? Double subscriptions?

On top of that streams are always a pain in the butt to debug.

The fifteen million obtuse methods/operators didn't help either (I see there are significantly fewer now).

And to remind you: it took the author of RxJava several months to understand the programming model: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/811561007504093184

[cassepipe]

Maybe it would be easier for you (and your colleagues) if the function to "observe" observables was called... observe, instead of "subscribe ?

[no_wizard]

not particularly, I think it would make it more confusing.

When I break it down to folks explaining its stream processing over iterables or async work and you subscribe (and can unsubscribe) a pipeline that runs over that stream, people get it quickly.

When I say you can "observe a stream" people start getting other connotations, for some reason. I have ran into this over and over and over. Smart people too, not talking about just juniors here

[cassepipe]

Indeed !

`observers` do exist in RxJs by the way: https://rxjs.dev/guide/observer