jpaulmorrison

Thanks for the kind words - it's a real boost when someone talks about how my work has influenced them! I would be happy to have a chat - are you in the UK? If so, we are 5 hours behind you, so we can plan a chat time accordingly... We could start the ball rolling by you pinging me at jpaulmorr@gmail.com ...

I took a look at your first (?) video, and IMO the human factors are amazing! That said, however, our areas of application seem a little different: at least your video is mostly talking about numbers, and I assume a mostly synchronous world view, whereas my work uses data objects ("Information Packets") travelling between asynchronously executing components... Given your orientation, it makes sense to be able to flip back and forth between visual and text representations - not sure it makes as much as sense in my environment! However, Chuck, IIRC, in one of the projects I worked on, built a network of around 200 processes, without drawing a single picture!

Talk soon!

Soon after starting work on what later became Flow-Based Programming (FBP), I decided that I should leave the block layout entirely up to the application developer... A few years later, James Martin (1981) was working on what he called 4th-generation languages, and the blocks were prone to moving around unpredictably as the text was changed... Very confusing, as people do like things to stay where they are put! This actually fits in with the idea of "loci" alluded to elsewhere in this page. In FBP, "stepwise refinement" is a key part of the design process, so you get a hierarchy of simple structures... I agree that you could add a function to "prettify" your diagram(s), but this should still be under the developer's control. And if you make it simple to move blocks around (as in DrawFBP), it's probably not worth the trouble!

That's a great acronym, but IMHO the acronym I came up with for the first iteration of FBP was also pretty good: DOORMAT (Data-Oriented Organization Running Multiple Asynchronous Tasks)! However, it was deemed to be lacking in gravitas!

General comment about the Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming : given all the interesting discussion on the 'Net, including this thread, it might be time to update the Wikipedia article.

The most substantive addition in recent years is Akaigoro's comment about Actors, added Jan. 2020 (@guitarvydas, care to jump in?!), preceeded, I think, by Joe Witt's reference to NiFi in mid-2018. This general lack of activity I feel might lead readers to assume that FBP is an outdated concept, whereas this thread proves it's definitely alive and kicking! I, personally, am not allowed to update the article, due to the WP ban on self-promotion, so I would like to encourage people to add topics, controversies, anything, to the WP article... Freshen it up a bit, as it were! Thanks, and stay safe, everyone!

"They" meaning "FBP-like" or "FBP-inspired systems", to use Joe Witt's terminology... They are usually control-flow oriented, and to my mind do not yield the productivity and maintainability advantages of the "classical" FBP paradigm shift. I recently asked Node-RED's Nick O'Leary why Node-RED only allows one input port, and the answer was something like "because we have never run into the requirement"... a) this is not something that can easily be added after the fact, without totally rethinking the product architecture, and b) trying to build complex systems without that feature would be, to me, like trying to hang wallpaper with only one hand! One litmus test I use is that of concatenating data streams using the two different paradigms - I tried to describe this in an article a year or so ago, recently updated: https://jpaulm.github.io/fbp/concat.html Cheers!

There's a good discussion in the Google group of the ideas that differentiate what we are now calling "classical" FBP (or CFBP) from FBP-like systems, more and more of which are appearing all the time - in particular the topic "Underlying models" - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/flow-based-programmi... .

If you are interested in the more large volume, data-processing, "classical" FBP implementations, a good place to start is my book, "Flow-Based Programming", 2nd ed., and the web site http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/fbp/ .