Hands-On Reactive Programming with Python

Functional reactive programming

The time has come to detail how to structure ReactiveX code in a functional way. It is tempting to name code designed this way functional reactive programming (FRP). Even though this name seems natural, it would be incorrectly named. FRP is something that was described by Conal Elliott in 1997 in a paper named Functional Reactive Animation. Functional reactive programming, as described by Conal Elliott, is composed of two types of values:

• Events that correspond to real events, or generated ones
• Behaviors that vary other continuous time

Events are the types of values that are implemented in ReactiveX observables. They can correspond to real events such as mouse location changes, some key presses on a keyboard, ...