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Comment by daotoad | Hacker News Reader

No need to assume malice, other human foibles like attribution bias and hubris nicely explain the horrific idea of calling your language/tool/project 'Observable'.

I, for one, am irritated by the name and hope they either change it or that the project fades. Things are confusing enough without this kind of nonsense. Yes, I get that each cell in a spreadsheet is observing its neigbors. Yes, it's nice that you can "observe" your code auto updating. Yes it's nice that people are trying to improve upon spreadsheets as a programming model. Don't be purposely obtuse right out of the gate by naming your project after a widely used pattern, tool or technique. Call it Cells or Panopticon or something. Please.

In other news, check out my new web framework, called MVC.

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Is this really that common a term in computer programming? I can’t say I see it used with any regularity. Maybe it’s a common term in some specific programming subcultures? Apparently it’s a deprecated Java class, https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.base... and something in RxJS (which I had never heard of before doing a web search just now) https://www.learnrxjs.io/concepts/rxjs-primer.html

The term “observable” used as a noun in a programming context seems to me very clunky and vague. YMMV.

I am much more familiar with the term “observable” in physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable

The Java class and many other occurrences grew out of the name of the Observer/Observable design pattern[1] in the "Gang of Four" "Design Patterns" book.[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_pattern

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns

The Go4 call this a “Subject” rather than an “Observable”. As far as I can tell the only occurrence of the word “observable” in the Go4 book is:

> Other user interface toolkits that employ this [Observer] pattern are InterViews [LVC89], the Andrew Toolkit [P+88], and Unidraw [VL90]. InterViews defines Observer and Observable (for subjects) classes explicitly. Andrew calls them "view" and "data object," respectively. Unidraw splits graphical editor objects into View (for observers) and Subject parts.

RxJS is just one of several implementations of ReactiveX, it goes well beyond JS:

http://reactivex.io/

I work primarily in .NET and Angular and it’s a well known term in both of those. Especially confusing with RxJS observable as they are related to JavaScript too.

It's a concept in larval.

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