Functional Reactive Programming

Just like Reactive Programming, Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) has unfortunately become an overloaded term.

Frameworks such as RxJava (see https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxJava), ReactiveCocoa (see https://github.com/ReactiveCocoa/ReactiveCocoa), and Bacon.js (see https://baconjs.github.io/) have become extremely popular in recent years and have positioned themselves incorrectly as FRP libraries. This has led to the confusion surrounding the terminology.

As we will see, these frameworks do not implement FRP, but rather are inspired by it.

In the interest of using the correct terminology, as well as understanding what inspired by FRP means, we will have a brief look at the different formulations of FRP.