Yeah, but like I said earlier, a bit of rest and some time out of the spotlight and he'll get bored. Then he'll really appreciate it (even if he never wants that light shining on him all the time, again).
The GoF wrote, "favor composition over inheritance". That much was right. Unfortunately, they missed the mathematical composition possible that was hidden inside these patterns all along, much simpler and fundamental than the design patterns themselves.
Erik was fired which is unbelievable; it's like firing Feynman. He obviously wasn't happy with Ballmer or the culture, and frankly neither were most of the MS employees in that audience. Ballmer's gone and suddenly everything MS does is becoming open sourced, for example. "A miracle". And just because quantum might sound cool, naming a razor blade after it doesn't make it quantum physics.
He's saying people are turning it into a buzz word that is losing it's true meaning, so instead of the buzz word, think of what it's really all about: composing and managing side-effects. Take a look at Google Trends for "Reactive Programming", it spiked over the last year or so,: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=reactive%20programmin...
Take a look on GitHub at all the projects with reactive in the name or descriptions; it's become a buzzword that people use to describe various things that don't have any relationship to the original.
Iterable is broken, as Erik said, because it has a hasNext() method, and a next() method, which is a problem because hasNext() causes side-effects to be evaluated.
Imagine if the implementation of the iterator has to execute a long running function, or wait for the next value in an observable to be pushed, like an event. So, if call hasNext() twice, then it may cause a side effect so that next() actually has a different result than it would without the side effect. Thus, it is not mathematically, a function, and can't really be used to build monads.
So, unfortunately, due to backwards compatibility, Java classes that implement Iterable/Iterator can't automatically get the benefits of list monads etc..., by simply defining a library of operators that take Iterable/Iterators, like C# could with IEnumerable/IEnumerator.
In C#, IE only has side effects in the MoveNext() method, which returns true or false if there's another element, and the effect is explicit in the name, which helps. However, more importantly, if you get the value from Current, there is no side effect, and you can do that as many times as you like.
With Iterable, if you call next() it moves to the next element. So, it is impossible to get the same value twice with a guarantee of no side effects, and impossible to guarantee mathematically sound composition of Iterables. The interface is broken, and changing it would break nearly every Java program.
This isn't really virtual time though, at least as realized by time warp. It's a virtualization of time, for sure, but almost completely unrelated to DR Jefferson's work [1]; no rollback of bad interactions or anything like that.
Rx is a one trick pony that focuses exclusively on the duality between event streams and data streams. Management of time in any real sense is completely missing from the framework. No continuous bindings, control flow must all be buried as data flow, etc...
React is a much better solution for writing reactive programs than Rx.
Brian Beckman worked on the Time Warp OS, with Dr. Jefferson [1] and was involved with the development of Rx virtual time. You can read his comment about how Rx virtual time could be used to create a Time Warp monad. [2].
Are you speaking about React.js? Erik's point about reactive being a buzzword and distorted is proven by that because it's not the same thing at all. React.js is cool and all that but it has nothing to do with guaranteed composition and dealing with side-effects and monadic operators. That's like saying Angular.js is better than list operations and functions that operate on lists.
That is a nice link, thanks! The previous video one was not talking about the same virtual time, as far as I can tell.
My point was that if you were building user interfaces, react would get you much further than Rx, which is a hammer looking for a problem where it is actually better.
If you want the ability to deal with side effects, I'm working that in my own work while avoiding burying everything in data flow:
Ironically, I started this work while working for Martin with the goal of making the scala compiler more "reactive" (the ability to responsively react to change); I actually succeeded while making minimal changes to scalac. Like actors or FRP, Rx can't be applied to scalac either, which desperately needs to be reactive to fit into the IDE. Rx's idea of reactivity revolves around event streams, virtual, managed time and frameworks like react attack the problem of change directly. Erik is right about useless definitions, but one based around change really works.
True. However, if we are able to elevate this type of technology to that level, people will train and be trained, to focus on such detail and learn to control the output via the feedback loop. At first you'd probably "draw" like a baby, but with enough practice, some would become true artists, and the average somewhere in the middle, but things would be recognizable and tada, telepathy.
