Introduction to Reactive Programming

Reactive programming has existed for years. We can find academic papers on facets of it going back to the 1970s. There have been asynchronous, event-driven programming stacks available for years, too.

So, why hasn’t it been picked up in the mainstream?

This is probably because most shops haven’t needed it. The world is entering a new era, though. Startups have to serve content to millions of users, international audiences demand around-the-clock operational support, and as the cloud-based hosting of applications grows in popularity, simply adding more servers doesn’t work.