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Ask HN: What happened to Reactive Programming?

1•ashddev•42m ago
I've recently been put on a legacy project that uses reactive programming and RxJS.

This is the first time I'm coming across this programming paradigm, it seems like it was trendy at some point [1], but the general consensus from the team is that it has become very hard to maintain, with a lot of side effects to manage.

Coming from an academic background and having some interest in functional programming, the idea seems interesting to me.

Does anyone still use this paradigm day-to-day (any example codebases, documented projects, tips on maintaining complex reactive projects in JavaScript would be appreciated) or has it mostly been moved away from?

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F02vz4nz&hl=en-US

Comments

cogman10•15m ago
Just what your coworkers said, it's hard to maintain.

It still has it's application but it's quite hard to ultimately work with. For example, if something throws an exception, if you didn't setup the pipeline correctly it's stupidly simple to simply silently drop the exception all together.

And even when you haven't done that, it can be really difficult to understand why an exception has happened. You might be able to fairly decently get to the stage in the pipeline where the error came from, but working back to how the inputs got there in the first place can be really difficult.

More traditional programming is just a lot easier to work with. An exception getting thrown gives you a stack trace that gives a pretty clear picture of how you got to where you are at. And, putting in additional contextual information can make diagnosing everything a lot simpler.

I'll also just say, I find Rx (js, java, C#, etc) to be overly complicated in general. I'd suggest just trying some other reactive frameworks to see what I mean. Kotlin's Flow api is pretty good (IMO) and really makes a lot of struggles around learning Rx much easier to grok. I found that a decent part of what made reactive programming hard wasn't the reactive programming but rather Rx's implementation of it.

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