Flow-based Programming

Re:Flow-based Programming by tbirdz on Saturday January 10, 2015 @04:48PM (#8868058)

On the topic of dataflow programming I found the book "Dataflow and Reactive Programming Systems: A Practical Guide to Developing Dataflow and Reactive Programming Systems" by Matt Carkci [0] to give a pretty good overview of the different types and implementations of dataflow programming systems. I think that flow-based programming sounds incredibly cool, but I haven't found any project where I could use it well... yet!

[0] https://leanpub.com/dataflowbook

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Re:Flow-based Programming by amelius on Saturday January 10, 2015 @04:59PM (#8868092)

I think the biggest problems with flow based or reactive programming are the occurrence of glitches, and, more importantly, the problem of how to compute updates without performing unnecessary work.

I wonder if these problems have been successfully addressed somewhere.

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Re:Flow-based Programming by seanmcdirmid on Saturday January 10, 2015 @07:58PM (#8868610)

My work [1] addresses glitches head on (hence the system is called "Glitch") by tolerating glitches and at least making the extra work functionally benign (via logging and rollback, like a transaction). Glitch is not based on data flow, however, but somewhere in between even if still very reactive.

I've built a few data flow systems in the past (my dissertation work [2] was based on one), but I decided to tolerate rather than avoid glitches early on because I found that way to be more resilient. Flapjax [3] avoids glitching via a topological sort, which I rather see as an optimization (to reduce unnecessary work) rather than as a correctness issue.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=2265...

[2] http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/179366/mcdirmid06superglu...

[3] http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mgbcgb...

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Re:Flow-based Programming by amelius on Saturday January 10, 2015 @08:09PM (#8868633)

Interesting. Do you know of any work that computes a data flow graph as the program runs (i.e. data flow is implicit in the source code), which performs then reactively?

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Re:Flow-based Programming by seanmcdirmid on Saturday January 10, 2015 @08:15PM (#8868649)

Ya, that is exactly how Glitch works, except I just call the data flow graph as a dependency graph :).

Computing the dependency graph dynamically obviously leads to a lot more flexibility. I'm not really sure what you mean by "reactively" here: if you mean does it reactively update computations as state (and even code, if you want to get Bret Victor about it) changes, then ya.

Data flow by itself isn't necessarily reactive; actually the way it was originally defined to work very lazy push things through. Continuous interpretations where changes were propagated non-lazily didn't come until much later.

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