On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 10:01 AM, sinelaw
I don't think a deep knowledge of physics is what we lack here, at least for the question of continuous vs. discrete time. Maybe the best physical model for nature really does involve discrete time steps. However, for our everyday experiences (and maybe for anything that's not on a the tiny quantum scale?) continuous time is the most natural model to follow. And when modeling changing values such as mouse position (the perpetual example...), animations, sound, etc. continuous time seems much more natural.
Don't forget to check out the link Conal posted, his short blog post about the subject: http://conal.net/blog/posts/why-program-with-continuous-time/
Sure, using continuous time sounds obvious, but the principle "What Would Reality Do" feels scary, because we really don't know what Reality is when it comes to time; or anything really, all we have is mathematical models that work good enough, and sometimes we have two different models that are used depending on how we want approach a certain problem (e.g. light: wave versus particle) I'm a game developer and I don't care to much about reality. But when I'm not in hacking mode to Get Things Done, I do care about composable, maintainable, and beautiful pieces software, and the way games are developed today are IMO far from that, so hopefully FRP will solve this one day and be efficient enough to run on average hardware.
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