Editing Dataflow programming (section)

==History==
A pioneer dataflow language was BLOck DIagram ([[BLODI]]), published in 1961 by [[John Larry Kelly, Jr.]], Carol Lochbaum and [[Victor A. Vyssotsky]] for specifying [[sampled data systems]].<ref name="Kelly1961">{{Cite journal|journal=Bell System Tech. J.|title=A block diagram compiler|author1=John L. Kelly Jr. |author2=Carol Lochbaum |author3=V. A. Vyssotsky |volume=40|issue=3|year=1961|pages=669–678|doi=10.1002/j.1538-7305.1961.tb03236.x}}</ref> A BLODI specification of functional units (amplifiers, adders, delay lines, etc.) and their interconnections was compiled into a single loop that updated the entire system for one clock tick.

In a 1966 Ph.D. thesis, ''The On-line Graphical Specification of Computer Procedures'',<ref name="sutherland1966">{{cite thesis 
|last= Sutherland
|first= William Robert
|author-link=Bert Sutherland
|date= January 1966
|title= The on-line graphical specification of computer procedures
|publisher= [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT]]
|hdl= 1721.1/13474
|type= PhD thesis
|url= https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/13474
|access-date=2022-08-25}}</ref> [[Bert Sutherland]] created one of the first graphical dataflow programming frameworks in order to make parallel programming easier. Subsequent dataflow languages were often developed at the large [[supercomputer]] labs. POGOL, an otherwise conventional data-processing language developed at [[NSA]], compiled large-scale applications composed of multiple file-to-file operations, e.g. merge, select, summarize, or transform, into efficient code that eliminated the creation of or writing to intermediate files to the greatest extent possible.<ref>{{Cite conference | book-title=POPL '73: Proceedings of the 1st annual ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages | author=Gloria Lambert | title=Large scale file processing: POGOL | publisher=[[Association for Computing Machinery|ACM]] | year=1973 |pages=226–234}}</ref> [[SISAL]], a popular dataflow language developed at [[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]], looks like most statement-driven languages, but variables should be [[single assignment|assigned once]]. This allows the [[compiler]] to easily identify the inputs and outputs. A number of offshoots of SISAL have been developed, including [[SAC programming language|SAC]], ''Single Assignment C'', which tries to remain as close to the popular [[C (programming language)|C programming language]] as possible.

The United States Navy funded development of signal processing graph notation (SPGN) and ACOS starting in the early 1980s. This is in use on a number of platforms in the field today.<ref>Underwater Acoustic Data Processing, Y.T. Chan</ref>

A more radical concept is [[Prograph]], in which programs are constructed as graphs onscreen, and variables are replaced entirely with lines linking inputs to outputs. Prograph was originally written on the [[Apple Macintosh|Macintosh]], which remained single-processor until the introduction of the [[DayStar Digital|DayStar Genesis MP]] in 1996.{{citation needed|date=September 2023}}

There are many hardware architectures oriented toward the efficient implementation of dataflow programming models.{{vague|date=September 2023}} MIT's tagged token dataflow architecture was designed by [[Greg Papadopoulos]].{{undue inline|date=September 2023}}

Data flow has been proposed{{by whom|date=September 2023}} as an abstraction for specifying the global behavior of distributed system components: in the [[live distributed object]]s programming model, [[distributed data flow]]s are used to store and communicate state, and as such, they play the role analogous to variables, fields, and parameters in Java-like programming languages{{OR|date=January 2025}}.