The reaction to my latest work [Two-way Dataflow] has been distinctly underwhelming. My diagnosis: I’ve solved a problem most people aren’t aware they have, and it comes at the steep price of replacing the conventional tech stack. Facebook has a cheaper solution: Flux. I have to give them credit for taking the problem seriously (unlike many of the reactive programming enthusiasts) and coming up with a pragmatic solution that just adds another layer to the stack. That’s what programmers want, not a fundamental solution in a new programming paradigm. It is obvious that we can’t keep growing the stack forever but no one wants to deal with it now. Especially computer scientists (don’t get me started).
I think I need to shift focus to end-users and non-programmers. I’ve avoided that because I want to prove that we can dramatically simplify real large-scale programming — simplifying simple problems is not so convincing. But replacing the whole stack is just too hard to do all at once and all by myself, and only doing it on small examples is not convincing either. End-user programming could be a way to get started and get users and (especially) have collaborators. Industrial strength programming would come later, but at least I now have a sketch of how it should look. Building something real would be such a refreshing change from the last decade of thought experiments. I’m excited by the prospect of once again shipping buggy code and having irate users and getting into fights with my colleagues. That’s life.