What is a good motivating example for dataflow concurrency?

Posted by Alex Miller on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Alex Miller
Published on 2010-05-30T06:42:28Z Indexed on 2010/05/30 6:52 UTC
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I understand the basics of dataflow programming and have encountered it a bit in Clojure APIs, talks from Jonas Boner, GPars in Groovy, etc. I know it's prevalent in languages like Io (although I have not studied Io).

What I am missing is a compelling reason to care about dataflow as a paradigm when building a concurrent program. Why would I use a dataflow model instead of a mutable state+threads+locks model (common in Java, C++, etc) or an actor model (common in Erlang or Scala) or something else?

In particular, while I know of library support in the languages above (and Scala and Ruby), I don't know of a single program or library that is a poster child user of this model. Who is using it? Why do they find it better than the other models I mentioned?

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