React: Building Modern Web Applications

Distinguishing the features of functional reactive programming

One of the leading lights of functional reactive programming, and arguably a grandfather to functional reactive programming, Conal Elliott, looked back on the term "functional reactive programming," and a leading light's second thoughts about a name can be very interesting. Elliott expressed a reservation about the term functional, suggesting that the word means so many things now that it means very little, and expressed a regret about a word that the term didn't include: time. He suggested an alternative name of denotative continuous-time programming, which is significant even if we use the more standard term of "functional reactive programming" here. By denotative, we mean, as we ...