Yes, these are basically the same thing. However, they have little to do with Conal Elliott's "FRP". Which itself is also badly named.
> Meijer (who invented Rx)
Well "invented". What's a bit surprising is that with both Rx and the Rx-style "FRP", there either is no public history of the ideas at all (Rx) or it is patently wrong (Rx-style "FRP"). Or a bit of both.
For example, the "Reactive" part of Rx-style FRP appears to come from the definition of system styles by Harel. Both the connection of synchronous dataflow with the term "Reactive" and with FP languages are made in the paper on Lustre, which is a language that integrates synchronous dataflow into an FP language. But there is nothing inherently FP-ish about synchronous dataflow, it was previously integrated into to the imperative language Esterel, and they also made a variant of C with synchronous dataflow.
Again, nobody mentions this, it is all presented as having been invented out of thin air and the principles of Functional Programming. (Or as having come from Conal Elliott's FRP, which is not true. Ask Conal Elliott).
Once I figured out the connections, I asked Erik Meijer, who has "I am the original inventor of Rx..." in his bio. He admitted that he was "inspired" by synchronous dataflow. And of course that is pretty much all it is. Except they dropped the requirement for it to be synchronous.
What do you get when you drop "synchronous" from "synchronous dataflow"? FRP, obviously ;-)
Just like Objective-C is Smalltalk + C, and Objective-C - C is ... Swift?
Controlling narratives is important.
He for sure invented observables (as we know it and as the mathematically dual of enumerables) - that doesn't mean it was the first ever reactive system or the concept of data being dependent of other data.
If I remember correctly he also explicitly talks abut Conal FRP and notations in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOl4E8x3fmw if interested
What is "documented" there is the alternate history of all this coming out of fundamental insights into FP and dualities and all that.
But that isn't the case, it just sounds a lot better than "I found a really complicated way to map dataflow onto FP concepts".
But we as an industry just love complicated.
(Waiting for the LISPers to chime in...)
