Chapter 11. What is Reactive Programming?

By now we have seen how parallel and functional programming constructs in the .NET world help one naturally compose algorithms/business logic and model programs/data flows. These paradigms help realize a software system that has close correlation with the real world in which they exist. We have seen relevance of data structures and their role in program composition. We also saw the benefits (in terms of concurrency and parallelism) of keeping the data structures (modeled in an object-oriented way) different from the algorithms (modelled as pure function compositions) that consume them. To take this one knot further, in order to keep up with growing system complexity, there's a growing software revolution called reactive programming, which defines how to model applications from a behavior stand-point. In this chapter, we will try to unravel the concept through some examples, and understand how this programming paradigm becomes a natural succession...