[InflexHQ]

I'll be adding this to Inflex (https://inflex.io/), I have the design worked out on paper. (But I'll be open sourcing it first and releasing as a desktop app, and then get back to dev.)

It's also helpful to think of FRP in terms of "push" and "pull" (for which there's a related paper by the same chap). This refers to control flow. Behaviours are "pull" i.e. your program has to pull from them. Events are "push" i.e. your program gets pushed to, by some other active agent.

The trick is how one "makes things happen". If you want to pull the latest tweets every 5 seconds, in reverse order, you might have code that looks like:

timer(5).joinWith(latestTweets).map(reverse)

Similar to promises you're always building up more declarative values. It's just that FRP has a clean semantic description. There are laws, and no assumptions about time/imperative escape hatches. It can be quite hard to use it practically for some types of apps; space leaks and cycles are a challenge, and some code can be messy. Research continues.

But for my simpler use-case, it's a very good fit. Spreadsheets use "volatile" cells to side-step the whole issue of interacting with time and the outside world, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth because it's a hack that makes state implicit. FRP brings a strong mental framework to address this properly, rather than as an afterthought.

[bbkane]

Inflex looks really great! I love the no-grid + reactivity premise!

[InflexHQ]

Cheers! Work stalled since having a baby a year ago, but I’m sure I’ll be able to return to it eventually.

[shinzui]

I got the impression that you're already using FRP for inflex.

[InflexHQ]

The UI is implemented using Halogen, a front end library for PureScript. That handles redisplay when recalculation happens. That’s more like React or Elm.

Rather, I mean exposing an FRP API to people using the Inflex language.