The event handling model is evil for web applications

This is a response in stack Overflow about What is the Haskell response to Node.js?

IMHO events are good, but programming by means of callbacks is not.

Most of the problems that makes special the coding and debugging of web applications comes from what makes them scalable and flexible. The most important, the stateless nature of HTTP. This enhances navigability, but this imposes an inversion of control where the IO element (the web server in this case) call different handlers in the application code. This event model -or callback model, more accurately said- is a nightmare, since callbacks do not share variable scopes, and an intuitive view of the navigation is lost. It is very difficult to prevent all the possible state changes when the user navigate back and forth, among other problems.

It may be said that the problems are similar to GUI programming where the event model works fine, but GUIs have no navigation and no back button. That multiplies the state transitions possible in web applications. The result of the attempt to solve these problem are heavy frameworks with complicated configurations plenty of pervasive magic identifiers without questioning the root of the problem: the callback model and its inherent lack of sharing of variable scopes, and no sequencing, so the sequence has to be constructed by linking identifiers.

There are sequential based frameworks like ocsigen (ocaml) seaside (smalltalk) WASH (discontinued, Haskell) and mflow (Haskell) that solve the problem of state management while maintaining navigability and REST-fulness. within these frameworks, the programmer can express the navigation as a imperative sequence where the program send pages and wait for responses in a single thread, variables are in scope and the back button works automatically. This inherently produces shorter, more safe, more readable code where the navigation is clearly visible to the programmer. (fair warning: I´m the developer of mflow)

The callback model is a design-level goto, and we will look back with relief when we finally get rid of it