Editing Dataflow programming (section)

===State===
One of the key concepts in computer programming is the idea of [[State (computer science)|state]], essentially a snapshot of various conditions in the system. Most programming languages require a considerable amount of state information, which is generally hidden from the programmer. Often, the computer itself has no idea which piece of information encodes the enduring state. This is a serious problem, as the state information needs to be shared across multiple processors in [[Parallel computing|parallel processing]] machines. Most languages force the programmer to add extra code to indicate which data and parts of the code are important to the state. This code tends to be both expensive in terms of performance, as well as difficult to read or debug. [[Explicit parallelism]] is one of the main reasons for the poor performance of [[Enterprise Java Beans]] when building data-intensive, non-[[Online transaction processing|OLTP]] applications.{{Citation needed|date=March 2017}}

Where a sequential program can be imagined as a single worker moving between tasks (operations), a dataflow program is more like a series of workers on an [[assembly line]], each doing a specific task whenever materials are available. Since the operations are only concerned with the availability of data inputs, they have no hidden state to track, and are all "ready" at the same time.