by Léo Noel, December 2021
Functional reactive systems have historically struggled to find real-world applications. However, advances in pure functional programming have revealed new applications and styles including not just discrete event streams, but also continuous-time signal processing, thus partially reinventing FRP. Missionary is a mature library that brings a functional approach to streaming, designed for clojure/script from the ground up and leveraging the full power of lisp metaprogramming in an expressive dialect, freed from the monad abstraction. In this talk, we're going to explore the benefits of this paradigm, what clojure can provide in this area and how it fits in the existing landscape. We'll cover various use cases through this lens, from basic RPC to backpressured streaming and complex reactive systems.
Léo Noel is an independent software researcher and consultant, focusing on functional programming techniques applied to IO-intensive applications and user interfaces. He created Missionary, a functional effect and streaming system for Clojure/Script. He is currently working at Hyperfiddle on a next-generation UI architecture.