Beliefs and the Unimpossibility of Functional Reactive Programming
Behaviors must be first class — this is a belief I have held for almost my entire tenure as an FRP researcher. The belief originated about two weeks after I learned of FRP, when I wrote my first FRP Arrow and in it tried to write a small game. The process was awkward; not as [...]
Reflections on a Holy Grail (FRP)
It has been two years, twenty-six days, six hours, twenty-four minutes and thirty seconds since my eyes caught the first glimpse of my mistress, functional reactive programming. Her simplicity, beauty, and power has captivated me since, but she has teased me — all of us lonely fools, really — by slipping through my fingers every [...]
Emphasizing Specialization
I have briefly—or perhaps not so briefly, my interests being unpredictable beasts—shifted the focus of my research to lazy specialization. This topic was discussed extensively, but not comprehensively, in Michael Jonathan Thyer’s dissertation, Lazy Specialization, and seems to have received little attention otherwise. This is unfortunate. I consider it a very important topic. Lazy specialization [...]
My Premonition
Last summer I got the opportunity to work briefly with Conal Elliott in Belgium. The two weeks I spent there are still making an impact on me; immediately I resonated with his semantic design idea. But the more important ideas were the ones I picked up subconsciously, and I’m just now becoming able to put [...]
Might as well face it, I’m addicted to logic
I’m trying really hard not to become a logician. Like my obsession with FRP, it would be very interesting and educational. But my FRP fancy came from a desire to make games more easily, and I have since lost interest in that endeavor, studying FRP for its own sake. Now I am trying to change [...]
Existential Memoization
FRP has this essential trade-off of computation vs. garbage collection. I can come up with implementations which are lazy in their computation, but never forget anything; and I can come up with implementations which forget but are too eager in their implementation (in which garbage collection has too much effect on runtime performance, because we [...]
The Third Virtue
Ever since working with the Anygma team, the idea of a purely functional operating system has been stirring in my head: An operating system that stays denotational and composable all the way down to the device drivers. In this world, we have to make no sacrifices like IO to interface with the impure ideas around [...]
Ha! I can’t even get Events right
No wonder FRP has been so difficult. In going back to basics, forgetting about behaviors and just doing Events, I realize that my belief that Events are “the easy part” has been flawed. Neither of the semantics I’ve had in mind are both implementable and appropriate. Or rather, they both are, but neither of them [...]
Ridding ourselves of IO before there is a good replacement
I have been researching FRP for about a year now without finding or discovering an implementation I like. I don’t know if there is one — maybe my standards are just too high. However, it has initiated me into the more general interest of purely functional foundations. Since I am tired of thinking and want [...]
Continuous Stream Fusion
I’ve been able to sketch-implement a version of FRP with a strange distinction: Env vs. Behavior. I’ll give you the intuition, then the rest of the article will develop the semantics more fully. I thought “backwards” to discover this (the word “discover” used under the assumption that it has some merit: questionable), from implementation, to [...]
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