Mountain West JavaScript 2014 - Be Predictable, Not Correct. by Pete Hunt

Functional programming is a great way of managing complexity in user interfaces. User interfaces are very difficult to build due to the difficulty in determining if they're "correct" or not. In this talk I'll go into some ways that functional programming techniques like referential transparency and immutability can lead to easier-to-build user interfaces.

Hey everybody, I'm Pete.

So, who is exited for some big O-notation in the morning?

Alright, alright, so we gonna get to that.

but before we do

i'm just gonna say I'm Pete.

I work at Facebook on the Instagram team

and I'm a contribute to a library called react

which you may have heard is the one that puts the
angle brackets in your javascript

.. but, I'm not gonna really talk to much of that
React and why it is so awesome because

that's not the interesting part

what I wanna talk about the ideas behind React

and React is a reference implementation of those ideas.

So. This isn't a turial

and I give a focus on ideas and not implementations.

So. I'm gonna talk about the ideas behind react

Some ideas behind other systems

how they're a different kind a

what a different tradeoffs are in there
are different tradeoffs between them

and hopefully you take some of the ideas and
bring them to your favourite system

or you maybe you think that react is cool
and you can tribute to it.

Lets talk about what makes user interfaces
difficult to build.

Has anyone build an user interface before?

Alright, OK. I figured it.

Was it really easy?

Yeah, testing it was super-easy,

maintainng quality was probably
a joke, right.

It's just a kind a .. always works

He said sarcastically

But you get this a lot

This doesnt feel right

So, you know - even if you use all the test driven
development that you can throw at it

you still have to have a human look at this

this doesnt look right and
this doesnt fell right

and when I click this button and I click this button
and I click this button ... it breaks

There's a lot of things that come in to this

They are human verifiedy but UIs
are also deceptely complex