Javascript – Functional reactive programming — is Fay expressive enough

Notwithstanding any specific ideas on the part of language designers, it bears mentioning that authors and stewards of programming languages are, in the end, pushing a product. So, I might ask why I'd want a camera-phone when my plain phone is a better phone and my camera a better camera, but that isn't going to stop manufacturers of both devices from trying to broaden their product's offering to attract new customers.

Once you look at it from that perspective, then notions of preserving the integrity of the original language become a matter of degrees and tradeoffs. If I'm the author of OOP language AwesomeCode and I see people starting to get interested in new functional language FCode, do I tell my users "sorry, but this is an OOP language only" and risk them going to C# instead to get at its lambas, or do I cave and grudgingly include some of FCode's functionality?

Functional relational programming seems to be, just as the name suggests, a blend of both functional programming and the relational model. I think this sentence pretty much sums it up (p. 42):

In FRP all essential state takes the form of relations, and the essential logic is expressed using relational algebra extended with (pure) user defined functions.

Functional programming removes state from the equation and deals only with pure functions (no side effects). This is supposed to make things easier on everyone by preventing data manipulation from being hidden therefore making it easier to reason about the program. FP is a beautiful ideal but in real life applications state is necessary and often useful. It is of course possible to have state in FP it's just a little more involved.

Based on a quick glance at the paper it seems they're trying to simplify FP by allowing state in a tightly controlled manner. Relational data is well structured and easy to reason about and functional programs are easy to reason about (maybe not in the human sense mind you) so let's augment FP with R and make everyone's state-loving live easier.