Comment by weiliddat

Hmm I have mixed feelings about this. I've thought about this topic for a bit, a couple of years ago I thought of bringing functional reactive programming to a backend node.js project (partially because of managing callback hell); in the past couple of years I work on an event/workflow system with 100+ million events per day.

This feels like a lighter weight alternative to Temporal or other workflow tools[0], but eventually for a backend system you'd likely be rebuilding features that are tailored for the backend.

In frontend code, you have many side effects (e.g. DOM, styling) that rely on a single piece of data/event, and more side effects that rely on those side effects (e.g. component hierarchy), and having this laid out declaratively is one way to understand the behavior of an application when this piece of data changes. You are also almost never concerned about durability/persistence of the state of data on the frontend, just because the code interacts with the browser and we almost never question the reliability of that API. A human is typically the "driver" of these interactions and is typically in the loop for most interactions, so stuff that fails, e.g. a failed network call, can bubble up to the user to deal with.

Conversely, web backend projects have code and infrastructure that are distributed (even monolithic ones), and most of the time are concerned with persisting state/data, distributing/scheduling workloads, etc. Each side effect / computation, especially ones that cross networks/service, has its own requirements for whether it should be at least once/at most once, retried/retry patterns, latency/throughput, failure modes/error handling. These requirements also define your boundaries/interfaces, rather than a nice semantic and declarative one (not exclusive but oftentimes the requirements win out).

Not saying that this signal-based approach can't be used in some areas of the application would benefit for declarative computation, but the examples given seem to indicate also a desire to do distributed workflow stuff.

[0] https://temporal.io/, https://github.com/meirwah/awesome-workflow-engines