Programming Reactive Extensions and LINQ

Foreword

For the past fifteen years, like a cyber-age captain Ahab, I have been hunting the unruly, fail whale of web programming. When you move from a single machine to the distributed world of the web, all of your existing assumptions about programming fail to hold. In particular, you suddenly have to face problems such as latency, network errors, and heterogeneity in data models, size, and velocity. You can try to ignore them, but they will invariably come back to bite off your leg.

Whenever I face a seemingly impossible problem like this, I turn to my secret weapon, mathematics, and in particular, category theory. Mathematicians often refer to category theory as “generalized abstract nonsense,” which actually is a rather accurate moniker. ...