How to think majorly in terms of streams about ama HOT 2 CLOSED

Hi Ny, thanks for the questions.

Sometime ago the idea of streams and dataflow clicked with me and has felt much more natural than typical imperative UI programming. I guess that once that click happens in your brain, it's hard to go back.

I feel like it's like asking Germans is it hard for them to speak in german all the time. They will promptly answer to you that it feels absolutely natural. With languages, you can learn how to speak them, but at some maturity level, you will start thinking in them.

To help getting to that level, I recommend drawing diagrams (at least that's how my brain works, with visualizations). Check this https://github.com/cyclejs/cyclejs/tree/master/devtool and this http://staltz.com/how-to-debug-rxjs-code.html

It may even help to draw such diagrams before writing any code. And then, when writing code, updating the diagram. This is possible because the concepts of streams and dataflow diagrams match perfectly.

The second part of my question is in reference to your talk at GOTO 2016 in November. You said that Cycle.js wasn't good for call-and-response mechanisms, for example HTTP requests. My real question here is probably more about: is it reasonable to think of streams everywhere or did you sometime have to tell yourself "Okay whoa.. this isn't working".

In another question in this AMA someone asked about that and I answered in detail. #22 (comment)
The short answer is 'doing chained HTTP requests in the frontend is an indication that something is probably wrong or missing in the backend'.

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Thank you @staltz.

I believe your advice will help me get a better grasp of all these concepts.

Come visit us in Canada someday ;-)

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