Conal is one of the people whose ideas have greatly influenced me.
The main idea that you should take from him is denotational programming. In simple terms, you relate specific computations to a specific model that has meaning to the programmer.
You should look at functional réactive programming from this perspective.
@neauoire 's Tote could be seen as having a bag of things and having reactions inside this bag, if the rules were executed out of order.
You should look at his critic of Haskell’s IO monad, for the same reason, that it has no denotational meaning.
It is for the above reasons that I am talking about a modeling language, because then we can replace the IO monad with something that has meaning to the programmer / user.
(More forthcoming when I get some time free)
Edit : John Baez’s paper is really interesting. I will look at it.