Dataflow Programming Languages [closed]

Answer 1

It is actually quite an old concept - in the 1970s, there was even a language + machine built for efficient dataflow programming and execution (Manchester Dataflow Machine).

The great thing about it is its duality to lazy functional languages like Haskell. Therefore, if your processing steps are pure functional, and given you have enough processing units to evaluate them and pass results around, you get maximum parallelity for free - automatically and without any programming effort!

Answer 2

There are certain domains where dataflow programming just makes a lot more sense. Realtime media is one example, and two widely used graphical dataflow programming environments, Pure Data and Max/MSP, are both focused on realtime media programming. I suppose their visual nature also maps nicely to the dataflow programming.

Answer 3

You could try Cameleon: www.shinoe.org/cameleon which seems to be simple to use. It's a graphical language for functional programming which has a data(work)-flow approach.

It's written in C++, but it can call any type of local or distant programs written in any programming language.

It has a multi-scale approach and seems to be Turing complete (this is a Petri net extension).

Answer 4

Excel (and other spreadsheets) are essentially dataflow languages. Dataflow languages are a lot like functional programming languages, except that the values at the leaves of the whole program graph are not values at all, but variables (or value streams), so that when they change, the changes ripple and flow up the graph.

Answer 5

Mozart has support for dataflow-like synchronization, and it does have some commercial applications. You could also argue that make is a dataflow programming language.

Answer 6

Dataflow programming languages are ones that focus on the state of the program and cause operations to occur according to any change in the state. Dataflow programming languages are inherently parallel, because the operations rely on inputs that when met will cause the operation to execute. This means unlike a normal program where one operation is followed by the next operation, in a dataflow program operations will execute as long as the inputs are met and thus there is no set order.

Often dataflow programming languages use a large hashtable where the keys are the data of the program and the values of the table are pointers to the operations of the program. This makes multicore programs easier to create in a dataflow programming language, since each core would only need the hashtable to work.

A common example of a dataflow programming language is a spread sheet program which has columns of data that are affected by other columns of data. Should the data in one column change, other data in the other columns will probably change with it. Although the spread sheet program is the most common example of a dataflow programming language, most of them tend to be graphical languages.