A typical bouba coder:
- thinks a kilobyte contains 1024 bytes
- thinks Object.assign clones an object
- codes in react.js, thinks he knows reactive programming
- “amd is better for games, intel is better for work”
- thinks that the main advantage of ssh is that you don’t need to enter your password manually
- watches porn in incognito mode
- “crapple”
- “uhm, is it immutable?”
- thinks “persistent” means saved to local storage
- thinks designer is an inferior job because “they only draw shapes”
- thinks good accessibility is when the tab key works
- “All non-mechanical keyboards are trash”
- “C is outdated and nobody uses it anymore”
- “Zuck quit uni and now he’s a billionaire, everybody should quit”
- thinks “pointer” is a shape of the cursor

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

The web is just a fucked up place. Anytime i have an idea and wanna slap together an mvp, i always feel like web standards are just made by people who have no professional training and once every year come up with some bullshit so they dont get fired.

Figure 1: cors
You wpuld think that setting "access-control-allow-origin" to * would let, well, * through, like in every other field of programming, but no, make sure all 97 other headers match or you will just get a cors error. The server expects application/json and you didnt specify that? Fuck you, have a cors error. Both express and flask have specific packages addressing this one problem so i guess im not the only one.

Figure 2: frameworks
Remember reactive programming? Remember rxjs? No you dont because all frameworks reimplement rx with shadow dom fuckery. Did you know you can have your fucking templates with 5 lines of rxjs code? Amazing huh?

Figure 3: php
It still exists for some reason.

When java was facing extinction, during the JavaScript, Node, and reactive programming hype. It did what it had always done. just adapt to the hype and maintain backward compatibility. We can all learn a thing or two from the humble java. It never rushes, it's patient. Be calm and wait before you hype yourself.

The primary concept of reactive programming is great. The idea that things just naturally re-run when anything they rely on is changed is amazing. Really, I think it's the next step in programming language development and within a decade or two at least one of the top 5 programming languages will be built entirely on this principle.
BUT
Expecting every dependency to be used unconditionally is stupid. Code that checks everything it might need all the time even if a decision can be made from much less information is simply bad, inefficient code. If you want to build a list of dependencies automatically, you have to parse the source.
And I really hate that there are TONS of languages that either make the AST readable at runtime or ship with a very powerful preprocessor that could be used to analyse expressions and build dependency lists, but by its sheer popularity the language we're trying to knead into something it was never and still isn't meant to be is JavaScript.

When I was assigned to develop my first app with web sockets. Since I fall in love with reactive programming and real-time applications.

When you try reactive programming.

It's impossibru: I'm doing RxJava + RxKotlin + RxAndroid and I'm understanding it.

Somewhat.

My tests pass, at least that's something. It's not yet doing completely what I want, but the hardest part is behind me. 🤩

My stickers on the top side of Mac. what are yours?

React + Redux + Router is do fucking awesome stack. Love It much more than angular 1.x. App works so fast, is scalable and easy to maintain.
Reactive paradigm for the winner!

Arghhh! Reactive programming took away all the fun, but oh well, we can be more lazy now. Functional programming just made a big come back this year.

I hate the fucking Spring WebFlux and the goddamn Project Reactor on which it depends!
Even debugging a simple CRUD microservice with simple business logic is such a pain in the ass, exception handling has a lot of "magic" implicit stuff which makes me waste hours in fucking trial & error and I have to use very little breakpoints because if a request is paused for more than few seconds it gets terminated.
I love functional programming but why shove it in fucking Java making me waste 90% of my time in trying to guessing what the fucking framework is doing, why not just use Scala which runs in the JVM? We don't even need compatibility with legacy code since it's a greenfield project!

And before you ask yes, I read a fucking book about Project Reactor and Java reactive programming and a lot of docs on Spring, Spring Boot and Spring Web Flux.

(I know this rant won't gather much attention, maybe there are just a bunch of people that know Redux and still less that used it in Angular).
I feel so bad, really, I just want to throw everything against the wall. I really hate ngrx, I hate redux and how it's de facto implemented in Angular. I talked with other developers and everyone around says that redux is hated only by people that don't understand it, and well, maybe it's stupid, but I hate it.

It's so different from Angular plain programming, why the hell I need to create a index.ts file? It looks so wrong.

Why the hell import * as reducer, why don't you just import the reducer?

Why do you need a switch statement? Really? We're in 2018, languages as python removed it, in the era of reactive programming why don't you just map a key to a function?

Why so many files? Why for a 20 rows module I've to write 5 files each of them twice longer?

Why so much boilerplate? The time spent at implementing everything will be ever gained back?

Why does everything looks so wrong?

I think one of the hardest experiences as a junior is the oscillation from perceived competency to perceived incompetency.

I just spent the last 4 weeks putting together my first major UI set of components for a financial calculator. Uses Vue, Quasar, a lot of data transformation and reactive UI programming. I felt quite chuffed. Its pending merge.

Then my lead asked me to help him debug something on the flagship and legacy project; for educational purposes, not that he actually needs my help. The application is 100x the size of the one I have been working on, and monolithic. Orders of magnitude more complex.

The jump from a sense of “I might be able to do this” to “I could never do that” was almost soul destroying. Like looking back over the last ten meters you ran, realising that running is hard and you did it. Only to look ahead and realise there are easily 100 miles ahead of you.

How the fuck do you cope with that.

Architecture for Java REST API going to build/port from existing NodeJS one.
So Spring Boot + *

Lots of concurrent requests and large MongoDB calls. Current APIs use like 4GB memory for each instance because they don't use stream/pipe the response. Hold all data in memory and then return it all at once to user.

And well we expect more load in the future, so want to do this the right way.

So my understanding since this morning, is there's the blocking? MongoClient, (find* returns List) and now a Reactive MongoClient which is very async and like JS promises. Based on Pub, Sub model.

But the downside of JS promises was callback hell.

So actually 2 questions.
1. For each request, the db call done using the same MongoClient/db connection such that if there are 2 requests one would block the other?
2. Reactive Mongo would be non-blocking by design so would be better to support streamed responses?

Modern Web Developer
(To the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance")

I am the very model of a modern web developer
I’m quite fluent with JavaScript; An HTML whisperer
My code is clean and elegant, I genuinely innovate
And even know my way around a Promise and async / await

I’m very well acquainted too with matters vector graphical
I understand why SVG coordinates seem magical
And even without Photoshop I elegantly can produce
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose

[Chorus]
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose
A mockup or a logo in most any format that you choose

I'm quite adept at ES6 expressions like destructuring
I know the ins and outs of functional reactive programming
In short, in matters browser-based or Node.js if you prefer
I am the very model of a modern web developer

[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer

I know our mythic history, the humble start, the browser wars
I know why Douglas Crockford fought the battle over ES4
The World Wide Web Consortium and Ecma International
My knowledge of our legacy is truly supernatural

With LESS and SASS and CSS, designing for mobility
I’ll perfectly apply the right amount of specificity
From custom fonts and parallax to grid and flex and border-box
I know most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox

[Chorus]
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox
He knows most every tip and trick both common and unorthodox

And when it comes to lazy loading, bundling up and splitting code
There’s nothing quite like Webpack, which of course is built on top of Node
Considering my resume, I’m certain that you will concur
I am the very model of a modern web developer

[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer

When new frameworks and libraries emerge I must be ravenous
And gobble up the hot new thing, my appetite is bottomless
React and Vue and Angular, Immutable, RxJS
The list will be outdated long before I'm finished singing this

My pull requests rely on multitudinous utilities
To help me lint and test and build, a deluge of analyses
And every single day there are a hundred thousand more to learn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn

[Chorus]
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn
The web is going through an irresponsible amount of churn

This pace is agonizing! Code from yesterday is obsolete!
The speed of innovation is enough to knock me off my feet!
It's happening too fast! I can’t keep up! I’m tired! It’s all a blur!
I am the very model of a modern web developer!

[Chorus]
He is the very model of a modern web developer!

❓Question:

I've recently been introduced to reactive programming, and I'm wondering some things about it

- How new of a concept is it?
- Can it be declared as a third type of programming compared to OOP & FOP?
- How common is it?