Aren’t signals just another form of Functional Reactive Programming or Synchronous Dataflow Languages? The latter exists for a very long time, and is used to build mission critical software (e.g. Lucid Synchrone, Lustre, SCADE from Ansys, …). The former exists in many libs like BaconJS, SodiumFRP, ReactiveBanana … but never became popular for some reason. Google and Brown University made FlapJAX, but that didn’t catch on either.
I hope this time signals will finally become widespread!
PS: the past 11 years I have been working on ViKiD an educational/creative website to learn the concept of signals, not for HTML, but for 2D reactive graphics and simple games. It’s far from finished, but I hope it will help adoption of the signal-way of thinking, which is more declarative, and allows better reasoning. All schools use MIT Scratch to teach our kids how to code, but that feels so imperative… IMHO signals are much more interesting to learn, and they stimulate a mathematical and declarative way of thinking.
Very nice article!
Aren’t signals just another form of Functional Reactive Programming or Synchronous Dataflow Languages? The latter exists for a very long time, and is used to build mission critical software (e.g. Lucid Synchrone, Lustre, SCADE from Ansys, …). The former exists in many libs like BaconJS, SodiumFRP, ReactiveBanana … but never became popular for some reason. Google and Brown University made FlapJAX, but that didn’t catch on either.
I hope this time signals will finally become widespread!
PS: the past 11 years I have been working on ViKiD an educational/creative website to learn the concept of signals, not for HTML, but for 2D reactive graphics and simple games. It’s far from finished, but I hope it will help adoption of the signal-way of thinking, which is more declarative, and allows better reasoning. All schools use MIT Scratch to teach our kids how to code, but that feels so imperative… IMHO signals are much more interesting to learn, and they stimulate a mathematical and declarative way of thinking.
Wow, Flapjax is interesting! It is like React, but without JSX, and from back in 2009!
Wow, ViKiD is really neat!