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Discussion on: Reactive Programming is not a Trend: Why the Time to Adopt is Now

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Jan Wedel • Edited

Reactive programming is a more efficient way to code and has been adopted by industry leaders as the new standard for developing applications with clean code.

Phew... how to start here... my question is: „more efficient“ compared to what? If you’re talking about JavaScript callbacks, ok then maybe you’re right. If you compare it to imperative sequential code, then I have to object.
I’ve written larger applications in both Typescript with RxJS as well as server-side Java applications with Spring WebFlux. And oh boy, the simplest tasks gets so hard to write compared to doing it sequentially. But not only that it’s more complex to get things done, the code is cluttered with framework boilerplate like Observable<>, flatMap, filter, etc. I want to have my code to be as much human readable and as much domain specific as possible. Reactive code isn’t and it’s really hard to refactor as well.

So to sum it up, reactive code is IMHO only one step to code that looks synchronous but works asynchronouly under the hood. This is achieved using coroutines.

It’s a awhile ago but I’ve Witten an article about it if you’re interested:

Trends come and go, as do frameworks, but there is one trend that looks like it’s here to stay.

So I really hope and believe that this is not the case.