How important is compatibility across implementations?

[jspahrsummers]

In @ReactiveCocoa, we've basically followed a scorched earth policy with regard to Rx compatibility, on the following basis:

1. Most users (and especially potential users) of RAC do not have experience with Rx, so any commonalities are lost upon them
2. LINQ terminology is often less intuitive than ML-inspired naming for our users (which may be surprising given Objective-C's Smalltalk ancestry)
3. We care a lot about doing things The Right Way™, and correcting perceived mistakes in previous versions of RAC or Rx, even at the expense of backwards compatibility
4. We incorporate a lot of ideas from @paulcbetts' ReactiveUI, which we're able to integrate holistically due to our complete control of the implementation
5. Objective-C is a highly dynamic language, so we can emphasize patterns that are simply not possible in other languages — e.g., the ability to observe arbitrary method invocations lessens the need for subjects

I mention all of this because others have emphasized consistency (across implementations) to a degree that we haven't really been interested in. It might be worth talking about this in more detail at a summit, and deciding whether our approach is good or needs adjustment.

@joshaber

[mattpodwysocki]

I don't think it's super important in the case of RAC because it really is on its own. RxJS for example treads on locations that Rx.NET cannot handle as well. I imagine the same would apply to Ruby, Python, etc. As long as we have a core understanding of some of the fundamentals and The Right Way such as:

1. Core objects of Observable/Observer
   • Enforced grammar of OnNext (0-N) | (OnError | OnCompleted)
2. Composition Operators
3. Notion of Schedulers to allow for changing of concurrency model at any point.

From there, everything else should be fair game.

[anaisbetts]

Save it for the Summit! :)

[jspahrsummers]

@paulcbetts Though it wasn't my intention, I don't think there's anything wrong with having these discussions asynchronously. Frees up more in-person time, and makes the results highly visible.