This papers is from 2003. Now in 2014, Functional Programming gives enough power to event-driven systems that its hard to beat by any other tools/tech/technique.
Reactive Systems are event-driven but highly concurrent, scalable, easy to maintain and extend because of the "high level" concepts of "Signals & Behaviors" instead of "low level" event handlers.
The manifesto seems silly. Reactive systems are defined as being scalabe, the very thing we want to achieve by using the approach (reactive approach in this case). Yet, the system needs to be scalable first in order to be called "reactive". Something went wrong.
The systems community has a very different understanding and use for events when compared to the PL community. All these papers are talking about wouldn't make sense from the reactive programming perspective (I work in both worlds and deal with the difference all the time).
The new mantra is Reactive Programming (http://www.reactivemanifesto.org/)
Reactive Systems are event-driven but highly concurrent, scalable, easy to maintain and extend because of the "high level" concepts of "Signals & Behaviors" instead of "low level" event handlers.