alt Hacker News> UI is also very much not functional,
I disagree, and I believe that the complete stagnation of GUIs is due to ignoring this.
There is no good reason why a GUI system isn't:
Description->Pack->Apply events->Generate assets->Render assets.
At each point you reify the result into an artifact that is everything the next stage needs. This has a couple of nice properties. One property is that everything is deterministic and testable. Another property is that after the pack and apply, everything is now embarrassingly parallel. Another good property is that you have an artifact that the accessibility people can latch onto before you bury it under pixels.
That would be a very functional way to deal with GUIs.
However, we continue inheriting properties and single main threading everything like we're still on 33MHz machines with 8MB of RAM.
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You are applying a one way arrow to events where in real life events do change state and can completely change UI (and functions) itself. Which makes imperative always the superior mode.
What you described works only in super simple scenarios. Whink Web 1.0, when Javascript was used for basic form validation at best, and didn't change DOM that much.
>> UI is also very much not functional,
> I disagree, and I believe that the complete stagnation of GUIs is due to ignoring this.
I disagree with your assessment.
>Description->Pack->Apply events->Generate assets->Render assets.
1. What does that even mean? I don't see a UI in there at all, at best some graphics (Render).
2. That's not "functional". If anything, it looks like a pipeline, so dataflow. But then again, see (1)
3. Not sure why reification, that is turning things into objects, is functional to you. Reification, that is turning things into objects, is object-oriented.
4. MVC was actually created on 5.8 MHz machines with 128KB of RAM (including the display buffer). And still works beautifully today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto