What's missing with FBP?

[Giant Elk]

What's missing with current FBP languages? Or missing with FBP based tools, IDE's, compilers, etc?

What's the top 3 reasons FBP isn't being used more, or everywhere?

Could FBP replace existing web and mobile languages, i.e. JavaScript?

[Paul Morrison]

On Monday, November 2, 2015 at 9:25:55 PM UTC-5, Giant Elk wrote:

What's missing with current FBP languages? Or missing with FBP based tools, IDE's, compilers, etc?

Dunno!  I can't help you here!  :-)  I've been using it in various implementations for over 40 years, and it seems pretty complete to me!  

What's the top 3 reasons FBP isn't being used more, or everywhere?

I believe it has to do with the paradigm shift from the von Neumann machine which is taught in all computing courses to the "assembly line" image - don't they all start with decisions, loops and subroutines...?  We are also constantly being told that asynchronous code is hard, whereas with FBP it's dead easy!
 

Could FBP replace existing web and mobile languages, i.e. JavaScript?

My gut feel is that JS only survives because it plays well with HTML, but IMO it's a horrible language!  And CoffeeScript is even worse!  But that's just me!

[Giant Elk]

Google Dart and Microsoft TypeScript are trying to replace Javascript, but seems very few people are taking the bait. ES6 has lots of advanced features from other more 'solid' languages. Facebook Flow adds typing to JS
https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://github.com/facebook/flow&ved=0CBoQFjAAahUKEwjF8ZSG3vTIAhVH0WMKHTXfAUE&usg=AFQjCNHUEzZv62zq34WRq3fIdJTq7V6mIw&sig2=vrx-yt0KFOuGRgbIUgQo9Q

So it looks like JS is here to stay for a while.

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[Jon Nordby]

On Tuesday, November 3, 2015 at 3:25:55 AM UTC+1, Giant Elk wrote:

What's missing with current FBP languages? Or missing with FBP based tools, IDE's, compilers, etc?

My very personal, and opinionated list:
 

* Better debugging tools, both interactive and retroactive.
https://github.com/jonnor/flowtrace/blob/master/doc/braindump.md
Some progress made in this project back in September
https://github.com/jonnor/flowtrace

* Diffing tools, textual and visual.
Both for review, possibly in distributed tools like Github, and ability to have a meaningful 'patch'.
https://github.com/jonnor/fbp-diff/blob/master/doc/braindump.md

* Refactoring support in IDEs.

Related> We made some significant progress on automated testing recently. Just missing release and proper announcement
https://github.com/flowbased/fbp-spec

 

What's the top 3 reasons FBP isn't being used more, or everywhere?

Mindshare, tooling and lack of success stories.
 

Could FBP replace existing web and mobile languages, i.e. JavaScript?

FBP is typically built on top of an imperative/OO language, and augments it instead of (attempting to) replace it.
 

 

[Giant Elk]

I think one big missing ingredient holding FBP back is lack of easy to use documentation. If you look at the docs for MeteorJS or Underscore, their API's are easy to find stuff, and good explanations and examples to get you going. 

Also tutorials for "Hello World", a "Todo" example and some other basic tutorials to get people going. ReactJS home page does good job of selling you on their stuff. You see similar howto's / examples with Dart or Babel for languages to help people get it fast.

Also, there's only 1 book that comes up on Amazon or O'Reilly for FBP, so lack of literature doesn't help either.

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Cheers,

Flying Horse Dancing

[Giant Elk]

Short 2-10min videos showing coding are what sold me on various frameworks from Rails, React, Meteor, don't see too many for FBP like these:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tabbarios

[John Cowan]

Paul Morrison scripsit:

> My gut feel is that JS only survives because it plays well with HTML, but
> IMO it's a horrible language! And CoffeeScript is even worse! But that's
> just me!

Go and read Javascript: The Good Parts. It's short and to the point and
tells you the awful (bad but unavoidable), bad (avoidable) and good
(actually rather pretty) portions of the language.

--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan co...@ccil.org
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarves.
--Murray Gell-Mann

[Giant Elk]

Yes I'm aware of the bad things javascript let's you do. Facebook Flow attempts to solve some of those issues. Also if you write clean code you can also avoid a lot of traps. I think the book is called Code Complete that talks about clean code.

Agreed that JS isn't as easy to work with as a strongly typed language. But I read that JS is the most used language today across the planet.

[Jon Nordby]

One can compile a bunch of languages to JavaScript today, using tools like Emscripten.

There are projects that allow you to write in all sorts of languages and run in browser;
from C & C++, to Python & Ruby, to Haskell & Clojure.

With asmJS this trend is likely to continue and strengthen.
http://ejohn.org/blog/asmjs-javascript-compile-target

This in addition to variations on JS like TypeScript, CoffeeScript, LispyScript, Sweet.js (macro/metalanguage) etc.

Would rather

--

Jon Nordby - www.jonnor.com

[Giant Elk]

To me not having a downloadable exe to install DrawFBP significantly reduces # of people that will try FBP. Hard core hackers will build it themselves. But in today's pre-canned framework world developers are looking for quick and easy. Most stuff today is a simple NPM install, or download an exe installer.

Also, take a look at node-RED docs, looks very nice. http://nodered.org/docs/ 

Unfortunately their network diagram source is a mess, and they don't mention any components in their docs.