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 time, just as I thought I was getting to know her.

A year ago I swore off the cold bitch. She was transforming my life into a single, unhealthy obsession. I needed time to think. Time — there she is again. Maybe by giving myself space, I thought, I could stumble upon a packet of wisdom and finally capture her heart, without really looking for it. But that sort of distance is a lie, my life continues to be about her. Distance only makes the heart grow fonder.

Last week I bumped into her at work. I am not proud of what I did. Forgive me for I am only human, ultimately incapable of suppressing the basal instinct that has ruled my kind for millions of years. That’s right, I implemented her, in the back seat of my Scala convertible. It would seem but a few hour fling on a whiteboard and an editor for the unprivy, but O how it intoxicated me! And it has not, as yet, ended in the heartbreak I have felt over and over again — she is quietly sitting in the back of my codebase, hardly a hundred lines, even doing some good if you can believe it. Maybe I am just fooling myself and this time will be no different. But, at the very least, I feel like I may have learned something.

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Perhaps FRP is not the sparkling Holy Grail of interactive functional programming that we have made it out to be. Maybe we cannot find an efficient, general implementation because there is none. Perhaps what we currently know about FRP is what there is to know — a book of heuristics, a collection of experiences and wisdom that tells us which of its features will and will not work together. FRP is not a single feature, you know, it really is a rather large design space, and quite a lot can be done with only pieces of it.

What I did at work was remarkably effective: I sketched how our server would read in FRP language on a whiteboard, and then I implemented a framework which supported exactly the operations I needed and no more. It took hardly two hours, and there is no spacetime leak, no GC nondeterminism. The situation in FRP seems to be something like that of modern theoretical physics: we have a few different theories that all work remarkably well for different kinds of problems, and if only they would work with each other, we would have a unified theory. But mysteriously, they just don’t seem to get along.

A unified theory is more than just something to please the eyes of pure functionalists — it is important to us because it would mean the fall of the IO monad regime. The book of heuristics I claim is FRP still needs a sin bin from which to retrieve the superglue that holds together the pieces of a complete application. So the school of semanticists cannot give a meaning to a complete program, only pieces of it. This makes us unable to prove things about a program, and unsure how to meaningfully compose multiple programs (eg. what kinds of things should and should not be allowed).

There are the quantum field theorists, attempting to bring gravity in to the regime of quantum mechanics; there are the string theorists, attempting to bring the rest of reality into the regime of general relativity. But I, as a physics layman, naively believe that neither of these approaches will end up being the workhorse of the eventual unified theory. I believe that said theory will come with a new way of looking at the world, rather than patching up the old ways. Maybe the expert in me can learn from the layman in me and try to solve the problem instead of clinging to the solution I think I desire.

What is the meaning of an interactive program?