Re (tilly) 1: Future of FBP

[tilly]

I believe that I am the one who most often brings up the idea of flow-based programming around here. I mostly heard about it from Stephen White in a Ruby mailing list, and thought it was an interesting idea. Another which looked related to my eye was toontalk, which was mentioned at Re: Any interesting philosophy of programming articles to recommend?. Unfortunately while interesting, the overhead to get it going in my current job didn't make it look like it would pay off.

If you want to get more of an uptake in Perl, Ruby, etc I would suggest that the best first step is to try to create a nice programming environment (in Java or otherwise) for the hooking together of components, and then document what exactly you need to do to be able to build components in any language. That will allow people to do the component building in any language that they want, and then put them together in your toolkit. If people are interested in duplicating the basic programming environment, they can.

An alternate approach is to instead of re-creating the IPC based approach, instead take a look at what people are doing with other programming areas, and see if you can add to them what makes flow-based programming work as a concept. For instance take a look at this article on XML::SAX::Machines and see whether you can implement the basics of flow-based programming in terms of XML filters talking to each other. (My gut feeling is that it is doable, though possibly the idea of SAX machines will need enhancement.) If so, then engage key people involved in that in a dialog and try to meet in the middle. I think it is easier for people to get excited if they see themselves running towards a future goal, than if they think they are giving up what they have done to start all over.