Flow-based programming
by J. Paul Morrison · first published 1994
42% recommend50% neutral8% critical
Why HN recommends it
Offers a thoughtful treatment of dataflow-style design, with an explicit model of connected components and relevance to data pipelines and visual or concatenative program structure.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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I suggest looking up Paul Morrison's stuff on Flow-based Programming. He's been using it in enterprise a long time. Also, if looking for glue, check out Wikipedia's list of programming paradigms or types of programming languages. Quite a few including some styles you…
on “Why functional programming matters” ↗How you looked at J. Paul Morrison's "Flow Based Programming" book? I recommend it since it touches upon a lot of similar topics. As your article points out, the concatenative style can be visualized as a flow; in the Morrison book flow is expanded upon with a…
on “Why Concatenative Programming Matters (2012)” ↗…encourage you to keep working on it and make this a reality. I've thought along the same lines and I think a language like this has real potential. I'm pretty surprised I haven't seen J. Paul Morrison's "Flow-Based Programming" mentioned anywhere in the post or these comments. I first read this book years ago as a undergrad and it made a big impact on me. It discusses ideas very similar to the ones proposed for Glow. You can…
on “Big Programming, Small Programming – Glow, the language” ↗It surprised me just how huge the impact was of reading about Flow-based Programming years ago (J Paul Morrison's book, though, his site is probably a sufficient substitute http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/fbp/) Of course, in recent times, it has become all that much more relevant to me…
on “Ask HN: What books had the greatest effect on how you structure your code?” ↗Maybe try Morrison's Flow-based Programming. It seems closer to hardware.
on “Why hardware development is hard, part 1: Verilog is weird (2013)” ↗Have you looked into Flow Based Programming by J P Morrison?
on “Programming as Theory Building (1985)” ↗Flow-based programming instantiates numerous processes that are inherently stateful: they sit in a loop performing I/O operations: they read packets from input ports, transform them, and put them into output ports. The system…
on “B-threads: programming in a way that allows for easier changes” ↗I have two questions. First, what exactly is Flow-Based Programming? Emphasis on exactly. I know what dataflow is and I know who J. Paul Morrison is and I've even browsed through his book. I still can't figure it out, and the book (at least the parts I looked at) had…
on “How Flow-Based Programming Could Save The Sanity Of Web Developers” ↗How similar is this to Flow Based Programming by Paul Morrison?
on “Introduction to Reactive Programming” ↗I'm just reading the book Flow-Based Programming (2nd Edition) by Paul Morrison[1]. I would say the main idea is to shift focus from control-flow to how data ("information packets") flow through a network of (black box) components and only use traditional…
on “Why do web sites and software take so long to build? And why is it so hard?” ↗…request. Once these constraints are satisfied, the only thing each subsystem has to do is work with those collections. Also of interest, and still in progress, is an implementation of J. Paul Morrison's "Flow Based Programming" concepts to control overall program structure. I was looking around at ways to minimize coupling, and this particular method added a degree of structure and contractual behavior. The first thing that…
on “Ask HN: How much of your time is spent on classical algorithmic problems?” ↗> Paul Morrison's stuff on Flow-based Programming Yep, have the book. In fact, my own OO/dataflow stuff[1] (also a good 20 years old now) is similar in some ways, and I am trying to merge ideas from Morrison as much as I can. Have also started trying…
on “Why functional programming matters” ↗J Paul Morrison "Flow-based Programming", while not really about documenting historical methods, got my head thinking about programming in terms of the pre-CPU paradigms of data processing with unit record machines, since that is what this…
on “Ask HN: Most interesting, mildly impractical, well-written books on software?” ↗…https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit/blob/main/src/docs/conc... . This doesn't mention earlier approaches (e.g. the Manchester Dataflow Computer, Prograph) and it seems to be based on vaguely similar ideas developed more recently (Morrison's Flow Based programming; possibly React and similar systems for web development - I'm unfamiliar with these). I have a number of questions: (1) How does the type system work? Is it Dependently typed, Hindley-Milner, or something…
on “Unit (Visual Programming System) [video]” ↗