G54PDC: Guest Lecture Note Index   This page contains links to
all electronic material used in the guest lectures given as part
of G54PDC, University of Nottingham, March 2012.   Guest Lecture
1: Functional Reactivity: Eschewing the Imperative  9 March 2012
Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is an emerging paradigm
for programming reactive, concurrent systems in a purely
declarative way. The FRP paradigm, or ideas based on FRP, has
been used to program robots, vision, video games, musical
synthesizers, sensor networks, financial event-based processing,
and more. The central idea of FRP is to write program in terms
of signals, or time-varying values, as opposed to values at
isolated points in time in a fundamentally temporally agnostic
setting. This allows for a purely declarative formulation and
avoids, by construction, many problems related to imperative
idioms for concurrency and synchronisation. In this, FRP is
closely related to the synchronous data-flow paradigm,
exemplified by languages like Estere