Dataflow programming

Dataflow programming is a programming paradigm that models a program as a directed graph of the data flowing between operations. Instead of a fixed sequence of commands acting on data at rest, explicitly defined inputs and outputs connect operations that behave like black boxes, and an operation runs as soon as all of its inputs are valid. Because each operation depends only on the availability of its inputs and carries no hidden state, dataflow languages are inherently parallel and suit large, decentralized systems. Dataflow languages share some features with functional languages and were developed to bring functional ideas to languages better suited to numeric processing. The paradigm was pioneered by Jack Dennis and his graduate students at MIT in the 1960s. Early dataflow languages include BLODI, published in 1961, and later SISAL, developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.