The main distinction that led to a different name is that (unlike most instances of dynamic or incremental algorithms) differential dataflow allows you to move through a partial order of updates, rather than a sequence of updates. This is important for automatically updating iterative computations, if you want to do multi-temporal streaming computation, and a few other reasons.

It appeared at the time analogous to multivariate calculus, though the better analogy appears to be to Moebius inversion (roughly: integration and differentiation on partial orders). Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Möbius_inversion_formula

"Moebius dataflow" would have been a pretty bad-ass name, I think we can all agree. And it might have done a better job of preparing the reader for what was about to happen to their brain.