Like I previously mentioned in Evan You's twitter thread, Observable-based reactivity is dated back to the dawn of modern GUI we know today. Back in the '70s, people at Xerox PARC created GUI with Smalltalk and introduced ValueHolder: a class that holds a mutable value and notifies its dependents whenever its value changes. Its invention came as to make their GUI interactive.
So no, Qt isn't, in any shape or form, a pioneer in this space.
AFAIK, many languages took after Smalltalk and provide Observable-based reactivity, though its use is no longer confined in UI development realm. Many languages introduce the concept as pairs: Observable/Observer, Listenable/Listener, etc.
If you like to read more on how Smalltalk approaches this subject, you can read more here.
In short, everything old is new again. People often keep thinking that their favorite technology / tool they use on the daily basis was the one which brought the innovation. But just like with many other things in life, timing is important too, not just the innovation.
Good timing indeed! Surplus.js showed us that signals + JSX are a great DX. Then Solid.js had a stab at it, and for various reasons, the community took off. Although reactivity isn't new, this is the first time that it landed within the JSX era of web development. React Hooks look like signals and effects, and they were keen on the DX, but the way they work isn't signals and effects.
As the article hints, Meteor Tracker is a good prior art on signals and effects history in JS (although not using the same terminology). The really magical thing about Meteor is that their "signals" and "effects" are database connected: you use variables in your frontend template, and those values can come directly from a backend DB. In many ways it is still revolutionary. What's gonna be the next revolutionary full JS stack?
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Like I previously mentioned in Evan You's twitter thread, Observable-based reactivity is dated back to the dawn of modern GUI we know today. Back in the '70s, people at Xerox PARC created GUI with Smalltalk and introduced
ValueHolder: a class that holds a mutable value and notifies its dependents whenever its value changes. Its invention came as to make their GUI interactive.So no, Qt isn't, in any shape or form, a pioneer in this space.
AFAIK, many languages took after Smalltalk and provide Observable-based reactivity, though its use is no longer confined in UI development realm. Many languages introduce the concept as pairs:
Observable/Observer,Listenable/Listener, etc.If you like to read more on how Smalltalk approaches this subject, you can read more here.
In short, everything old is new again. People often keep thinking that their favorite technology / tool they use on the daily basis was the one which brought the innovation. But just like with many other things in life, timing is important too, not just the innovation.
Good timing indeed! Surplus.js showed us that signals + JSX are a great DX. Then Solid.js had a stab at it, and for various reasons, the community took off. Although reactivity isn't new, this is the first time that it landed within the JSX era of web development. React Hooks look like signals and effects, and they were keen on the DX, but the way they work isn't signals and effects.
As the article hints, Meteor Tracker is a good prior art on signals and effects history in JS (although not using the same terminology). The really magical thing about Meteor is that their "signals" and "effects" are database connected: you use variables in your frontend template, and those values can come directly from a backend DB. In many ways it is still revolutionary. What's gonna be the next revolutionary full JS stack?