Fnk by most means will be an environment for dataflow programming. This means the “execution” of Fnk patches will be done by modules; these modules process certain input parameters to create a new output that is then handled to another module. Having those modules process data sequentially is the purpose of a dataflow language.

Dataflow programs are something a bit new to me – I haven’t heard of them until last year. The more I research into the subject, the more I’m surprised – this is something that has been going on for quite a while.

Recently, I’ve been specially mesmerized by some publications from the Computation Structures Group of the MIT. These guys have been on the subject for quite a while.

There’s something eerie about using a paper from 1974 that has been typed on a standard typewriter and then scanned into a PDF (Memo-110) as a reference to a project that intend to build a high-level, real time multimedia processing environment, but it’s undeniable that some of the terminology used and concepts presented there are part of what I have to gather for my own work. How else could I know that Fnk will use an acyclic static dataflow programming structure?