It looks like this whole notion of 'stream' is just a syntactic sugar for javascript guys who lost themselves in a bunch of nested stupid callbacks, which is worse than lisp parens. Instead of nesting whole callbacks, create a stream in the middle; execute first half of callback chain and dump the result into the stream so that next half of callback chain can be executed later.

Why is this so an enlightenment for node guys? UNIX does it right since epoch - simple programs perform simple tasks and connected via pipes. Python has gevent, so you don't even need 'a stream' or other bullshit, you just write the code as-is and greenlets provide the concurrency needed.

The real enlightenment comes from 'programming properly'; you start with C and torture your brain with function pointers and realize why it is a good idea to treat functions as a first-class objects. then you learn some 'proper' functional programming languages like lisp or something to learn how to think in functional way. which is the only guaranteed and proven path to prevent yourself from shooting your own foot by writing 20+ nested callbacks. If you start with binding an anonymous function to a <button>'s click event and think you can do this to do real programming, you'll never get it right.